Chapter 1

ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE DAYS...

Garrett M. Auslander lowered his head onto the bar with a thump. "Getting my arm shot off didn't bother me, you understand," he said, "it was what happened after that. My Volkswagen! That was definitely when it started."

The bartender paid no attention. He wasn't paid to listen to Garry's troubles — hadn't been, at any rate. The sign above the bar mirror listed psychiatric rates along with the prices of various cheap liquors the place served.

Garry lifted his head back up to sip his beer. The bartender pointed at the rate list. Garry paid no attention.

"Anyway, putting on a tourniquet was a problem, but I managed it. Then I fixed the detonator and blew the Arth Warriors**The Arth Warriors, insect-like mercenaries of uncertain origin or motivation, plagued 23rd century civilization on a daily basis. Where they went, tragedy and plunging stock markets followed. Against "The Ant Roaches From Hell" (or, as some called them, "Gehenna's Hessians"), local, state, national and planetary governments were powerless. The federal government launched a campaign of highly successful press releases and declared that victory would be achieved in another six months.Since somebody had to do something in the mean time, Garry Auslander did — even though there were more than a few important Board of Directors meetings he'd had to miss as a result.There is no truth to the rumor that he went off to fight Arth Warriors in order to miss said board meetings. to hell. And do you think the insurance people were grateful because I'd just saved their lives and most of their building?" spat Garry. "Oh, no. I spent six months in a regenerator cast and didn't get so much as a card from any of them." He brightened marginally. "Except the company president. She sent me a bill for damages."

He finished his drink and paid the bill. "So that was fine. But then they denied my claim for the loss of my car just because the accident involved a SQUID. Act of God, they said. The ingrates. That was what bothered me. Not the money — I could write that off as an AusCorp business expense — the attitude."**In fact the monetary losses did bother him, at least a little bit.Given that AusCorp was the galaxy's sole source for faster-than-light communication and transport equipment, and that Garry owned the entire franchise, you might think that he was impossibly rich.Once upon a time he had been. Then he'd started in on saving people from Arth Warriors and so forth — which he didn't mind at first, even when he'd had to start spending his wealth on lawyers' fees and settlements for collateral damage. It was the ungratefulness of everyone that bothered him far beyond the monetary losses.However, the latter had now made him only possibly rich.

Garry stumbled outside into the darkness and made his way over to his shuttlecar. He was about to stick his key into the lock when he noticed there was a piece of paper wedged in the door handle. He took the paper out and squinted at it in the dim light from the bar's front window...

It was a parking ticket. Garry looked at it and sighed in a way that would have made Shakespeare have sudden doubts about whether the ending of Hamlet was quite as tragic as it could have been if he'd banged away at it a bit more.**"Hmm...maybe if he kills Horatio, too..."

Garry sat down on the sidewalk for a few minutes of feeling wholly depressed. Then he looked up into the star-drenched sky — and became transcendentally depressed, because an enormous spaceship appeared overhead and proceeded to blow up most of the business district, including the local branch offices of AusCorp.

Sigh.

"Here we go again," Garry groaned, jumping up with a distinct lack of enthusiasm as sheets of flame leaped skyward and a couple of people ran screaming in panic. Fortunately it was after 5 P.M. and the workers had all gone home.

He dragged open the shuttlecar door and dived inside. With due haste he engaged shields, set course for the dreadnought above him, lifted an Alco-blast tablet to his lips and...and...

"Oh, the hell with it," he muttered. Heroism? You could have it. He set the autopilot to take him safely out of the plane of the ecliptic, lifted off into the darkness above, drank half a bottle of Four-Eye Monongahela and passed out.

He woke up late the next afternoon and pried open a bloodshot eye. Photons from the astrogation display battered their way through his cornea, smashed into his retina and telegraphed to his frozen brain the horrifying message that according to the ship's sensors the entire planet had been annihilated.

His brain melted and poured down his spinal column in an icy rush, cornered sharply at his coccyx and swept into his stomach, dragging it down into his intestines.

"Oh, lord," he said. "How am I going to explain this?"

Horrible fantasies of telepop reporters demanding answers floated before his eyes, followed by visions of inquests, lawsuits and possible jail terms.

Then again, it was a big galaxy. Maybe nobody would notice.

Chapter 2

GOES DOWN THE TUBES

If you took Mel Gibson, painted him blue and shrank him down to 4' 2", you'd make him very angry. You'd also make him bear a frightening resemblance to a small creature sitting in one of the maintenance tubes on board the Federal Navy Ship Olaf Stapledon...

Gremlin shifted his position slightly and fed the stiff wire into the access pinhole on the front of the status display panel. Some judicious poking brought the hook end of the copper filament into contact with the guts of the ship's diagnostic system. There was a spark — just one. He smiled and sat down to watch the reactions of the command crew on the monitor he'd connected earlier.

On the bridge, the Olaf Stapledon's first officer stared at his screen and paled a bit. "Captain," he said, "the ship's fusion reactor is about to explode."

The captain turned his gaze from the view of Marau V he was enjoying and blinked concernedly. "Oh? What do you think we should do?"

"I recommend emergency evacuation, sir, of the ship's vital personnel."

"Oh," said the captain.**Captain Clarence Minor Augustus (2246- ):Known to his superiors at FleetCom as a complete nonentity, Clarence led an undistinguished life until he became a captain of the stellar navy.Born on the planet Spoon, Clarence maintained a remarkably consistent C minus average from kindergarten on through navy command school. His transcripts show that he was an enthusiastic member of the Botany Club, and he won an award for best re-creation of a 20th century American lawn thanks to his skill with molds and smuts.In 2300 he signed aboard the Olaf Stapledon as an ensign and was subsequently promoted to captain. Exactly how he managed this remains unknown. His First Officer, Dale Whippen, spent a considerable amount of money and time researching Augustus's military history and had discovered no record of recommendations, no above-average test results, no ambition that would provide motive for bribery, nothing to suggest how the man had acheived the rank. Whippen finally decided that the appointment was an accident, rather like the formation of the Senate Ethics Committee. He was probably right. "Who's that, then?"

"Us, sir."

"Oh yes. Sensible. I concur. But what about the rest of the crew?"

The first officer shrugged. "If you think there's time," he said in a way that made it clear that in his opinion there wasn't, not that he cared.

In darkness, Gremlin frowned. Fortunately he'd already tricked the rest of the crew into the escape pods. He stood up and started walking.

A quiet voice from a speaker on the bridge announced "Total destruction of this vessel will occur in ten minutes." It sounded oddly pleased about the situation.

The captain sighed. "Ah, well, the computer seems to agree with you." He rose and trotted after the first officer, who was already out the door.

After a while the quiet voice said "Escape pods launched. Total destruction of this vessel will occur in five minutes." It started counting down.

"Four minutes fifty seconds. Four minutes forty seconds..."

Time passed. On the count of ten seconds Gremlin walked on to the bridge, whistling Handel's Funeral March as time ran out.Time ran. On the count of ten seconds Gremlin walked on to the bridge, whistling Handel's Funeral March as time passed out.

"Three. Two. One." Suddenly --

Nothing happened except that Gremlin laid in a course at the navigation station and, with the press of a button, sent the Olaf Stapledon hurtling away from Marau V.

He flopped down into the command chair and contemplated his prospects. Theft of a million-ton starcruiser? Commendation. Maybe even a promotion to the fifth Id'Hri.

He caught himself with a start. "No, Ch'Kari," he thought, stroking the golden tooth that hung on a chain around his neck, "Th'Raet would never approve." Pride was no less dangerous for a member of the El-Ahara than for...humans. Still, he couldn't resist a grin — a grin that collapsed when the ship stopped dead in apparent defiance of the laws of physics, and the systems monitor began flashing "Popdrive Failure".

Gremlin cursed and headed for the engineering section in a fit of hopeless optimism.**Invented by Prof. Berkeley Sartre in 1999, discontinuity drive (better known as popdrive) makes use of his "Sartre Quantum Interface Device" (SQUID) to cause particles to jump millions of quanta of space from one chronon to the next, as opposed to the normal maximum rate of one quantum per chronon.Popdrive revolutionized space travel beginning in the early twenty-first century by allowing spaceships with true velocities as low as 55 miles per hour to achieve the equivalent of lightspeed; it also made the fighter blimp a reality.See also Probability, Law Of Conservation Of.(From the Encyclopedia Galactica, Reader's Digest Condensed Version, 2276.)

A few minutes later Gremlin stood in front of the flat black box of the popdrive. He didn't know much about how it worked, but he wasn't about to use the distress signal until he'd explored all other options.

"Stupid moron human designs," he said, searching for the maintenance panel. "You can never find the glove compartment on these things..."

He found a row of little doors and started opening them, hoping to find — something; an owner's manual, maybe. The first few panels he opened revealed normal, functioning program modules; the fifth revealed...

"Oh, Th'Raet," he said, taking the tiny object from the space that should have been occupied by a popdrive control module. It was a ceramic tooth almost identical to the one brushing his bare blue chest. "Oh, Th'Raet," he said again as his stomachs hit the bottom of his abdominal cavity. It was indeed a tooth of Th'Raet: a gremlin's calling card.**The chief figure of gremlin theology and its primary philosopher, Th'Raet is said to have attained enlightenment while having each and every one of his teeth removed upon the stone examining table of the Greek sophist, Pedraeius.It was only after this, in fact, that he acquired the name "Th'Raet", which translates to "The Old Trickster" in English. The translation is exact, and itself poses interesting questions. The Native North American tribe that had inhabited the Omaha region of the continent held a rather similar figure, with an identical title, in its mythology. Delving has shown that incidental stories are alike between the two figures, which would seem to suggest some sort of connection; however, investigation of this possibility is beyond our resources at this time since all of the Indians of the Omaha tribe are no longer among the living. If Garrett M. Auslander ever works out time travel to his satisfaction, perhaps we can wheedle some sort of grant off of AusCorp and go ahead with enlightening everyone about the roots of the gremlin religion — or, perhaps, the Omaha Indian religion.-- from "El-Ahara: Motives, Methods and Meanings" (2133) by Godfrey Plenora III

He studied the tooth's coloration. Purple. "Oh, wonderful," said Gremlin, embarrassed. "Ch'Kari of the fourth Id'Hri gets zapped by a trainee." **Field-workers of the El-Ahara are divided according to ranks, or qualification levels. As in, say, karate, each rank is assigned its own color. The colors are most noticeably used on the sacks that the field-workers use to store tools and equipment. As the field-worker advances in rank he is awarded a new sack of appropriate color.The colors progress in reverse spectral order, with purple being trainee or level 0, and progressing toward red. A bearer of the red sack is referred to in the native tongue as being of the fifth "Id'Hri", which rank is quite high. We have reason to believe that the scale progresses beyond red, but we have no idea what colors are used.The sacks normally contain a wide variety of extremely sophisticated tools and equipment, and consequently no gremlin is ever seen without one, unless he is attempting qualification for the next higher rank. Exactly what operatives keep in the sacks is unknown as the sacks invariably blow up when we try to look in them.-- from "Mechanisms of Misfortune" by Godfrey Plenora III

It was his own fault, in a way; he should have inspected the vehicle first. "Perils of a free-lance operative," he reflected. "Spectral Council can't keep track of everybody." He sighed and trudged back to the bridge.

After studying the communications controls, Gremlin pushed a button gingerly and the distress signal kicked into action. The room filled with the sound of the ship's cry for help.

"Oh, no," groaned Gremlin, collapsing into the Captain's chair. It was even worse than he'd feared. In fact it was --

"(h3rry p@nk @nd @ppl@ bl@550m wh1t3..."

-- Frank Sinatra. **Surprisingly, this made sense. If you make people think you're tying up the distress channel with old swing tunes they'll come to you with amazing speed.The drawback, which the manufacturer of the equipment had overlooked, is that the people who show up tend to arrive shooting.

Gremlin would have much preferred Johnny Mathis.

Chapter 3

WHY DOESN'T ANYTHING NICE EVER HAPPEN TO HEROES?

Garry stared out the window at the total absence of the late planet — what was it? Ah yes: Lompoc. He groaned, and groaned again. Any minute now the President of These United Stars would be calling him up on the popcom to demand an explanation.

"I can handle it, no sweat," he told himself, and promptly broke into a cold one.

The dashboard computer queeped and the windshield lit up with the legend Incoming Message — Popcom channel GMA-1. Garry sighed and broke into another cold one, after tossing the empty into the back seat.

"What am I doing?" he said, staring at the beer can. "I don't even drink!"

He made a mental note to review his psych evaluation and then pressed a button to pipe the transmission onto the screen. "I can explain," he began — and then stopped:

AUSLANDER: Sic transit gloria mundi. Comprende? Let's do lunch.

--Cyrus Rainer

"What the hell is that?" said Garry. And where was it coming from? He flicked on the ship's tactical display and tracer. A glowing grid overlaid the windshield and a red dot began blinking in the upper left to signal the location of the popmitter: very close. A few minutes of maneuvering the shuttle brought into sight — a tiny white box. He fetched it inside via waldo and examined it. Nothing of obvious significance about it; no writing, no buttons, nothing. Apparently just a popmitter. He stuck it in his pocket.

"Another mysterious message, huh?" said Garry. "Typical. Freaking typical." He thumped his fist on the steering wheel. "Rainer...never heard of him. Have I?"

He returned to the computer in order to punch up his diary, but on impulse activated the popcom news channel instead.

"...police raid revealed a cache of drugs with a street value of five million dollars, and an additional three hundred thousand dollars in cash and prizes. In other news, the cause of the apparent destruction of the planet Lompoc is still unknown. Garrett M. Auslander could not be reached for comment, although AusCorp Public Relations stated he was most likely on the job..."

Garry turned off the popcom and sat back. Then he sat forward, turned the popcom back on and tuned to the channel reserved for distress calls.

"@11 0f m3...why n0t t@k3 @11 of m3," sang Frank Sinatra.

"What in sheol? This is too much!" Fuming, Garry reset the tracer, activated the popdrive and floored the accelerator, sending the stars flickering past like bad stop-motion animation. The Lompoc problem could wait. People tying up the distress channel were more important.

Minutes later the shuttle arrived at the transmission's source: a Zucker class Federal Navy ship by the look of it.**The sign on it read A Zucker Class Federal Navy Ship. Garry parked the shuttle in the escape pod dock.

The airlock door opened and he entered the spare, metallic interior of the ship. After consulting a handy map on the wall, he found his way to the ship's control room — and the distress signal popmitter, which was now blasting "The Candy Man". In the absence of a baseball bat he turned it off. A moment later he was bowled over and wrestled to the floor.

Chapter 4

IT TAKES TWO TO TANGLE

Gremlin blinked in amazement for the second time that day. "Garry?" he asked, releasing his grip on Garry's lapels.

"Nice to see you too, Grem," said Garry. "I realize you're the sworn enemy of the human race, but I thought I was sort of exempt, you know?"

"Sorry, sorry," said Gremlin, helping Garry to his feet. "But my name is Ch'Kari."

"Oh, yeah. Ch'Kari," said Garry, "Ch'Kari. Uh, Grem, I think I could use your help with a certain problem I have." He turned on the Stapledon's popcom.

"...at last estimate, 1.5% of the Milky Way has been annihilated," said the news announcer with appropriate concern.

Garry blanched. Then he blushed. Then he blanched again. Decisions, decisions.

"Here is a followup on the recorded message found where Alpha Centauri used to be... The message is, quote, the destruction will continue until I get what I want, unquote. The President issued a sincere apology to those who have been inconvenienced by this tragedy, and added that the perpetrator would be more likely to get what he wants if he would say what he wanted and who he was..."

Garry's face decided on strawberry as he remembered the box in his pocket. "Grem, I'm going to AusCorp HQ and, uh..."

"Say no more, I'm coming with you," declared Gremlin, as though he had a choice.

"A bulletin has just been handed to me," said the announcer. "It reads, Get out, man, the station's about to be--"

Silence ensued.

"Damn," said Garry. "That was my favorite station."

Chapter 5

ON THE ROAD AGAIN (SANS ROAD)

The shuttle rocketed through the stellar firmament. Well, no it didn't. It skipped. Popdrive was funny that way.

Gremlin looked carefully at the duraplasteel windows. "Nice car," he said politely. "Karmann-Ghia, is it?"

"Reproduction," corrected Garry. "Custom built and redesigned. You don't see many Karmann-Ghias with popdrive."

"Is it...safe?" asked Gremlin.**Unstated question: "Sane people don't go flying about the galaxy in sports cars, do they?"

"Nothing is safe," said Garry after thinking for a while.**Unstated answer: "That depends on you, doesn't it?" "So long as the SQUID**When Berkeley Sartre — then seeking venture capital — first proposed the SQUID, many physicists called him a lunatic behind his back. Then they circled around and said it to his face. They also said "A) Its theory of operation is based on a debased, even demented, misunderstanding of quantum physics, B) it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and C) it's unpatentable because some guy already described it in a book back in 1980."Berkeley packed the A's into a small room with a crack team of philosophers and mathematical theorists until they were unsure of their own existence, their knowledge of the universe, and, in some cases, whole numbers. They'd had to take up gardening.The B's eventually admitted that since the device had to spend time "hooked up", as it were, to a black hole by way of a Probability Pump in order to work properly it wasn't a blank check for anything.The C's felt rather smug because the status of the SQUID was never resolved: Berkeley's entire concept, notes, prototype and all, was traded to the fledgling AusCorp for a blank check and classified as a trade secret. is working, there's no problem. If it stops, we're dead real quick, so what difference?"

"What happened to your Beetle?"

"Imploded," snapped Garry, rather brusquely.

"Oh," said Gremlin.

Garry thumped the heel of his hand on the steering wheel of his quasi-Karmann-Ghia.

It wasn't the Beetle, but he'd grown to...well, if not love it, at least like the hell out of it. The AusCorp Hyperphysics Division wanted to install their revised Virtual Space Manager in it. He'd told them to get stuffed, despite their sworn oaths that nothing would go wrong "this time". They'd said much the same thing before the Beetle imploded due to design flaws in the original VSM.

"Are you sure you're interested in helping me with this Rainer guy?" asked Garry.

"If he's a danger to the El-Ahara, I want in," declared Gremlin. "Besides, I owe you for more than a few things. How much longer?"

"96 minutes, give or take," said Garry.

That seemed to conclude the conversation, so Gremlin grunted "Fine," and crawled into the back seat for a nap, leaving Garry alone with his alleged thoughts as the stars plunged disjointedly past.

For the first time Garry found himself wishing he had never quit his job at Acme. Sure, it had been dull. But it hadn't half the negatives of this job. He found the bottle of Four-Eye and took a pull.

"Save this, save that, risk your life for us. And then answer to the news for why you didn't do a better job."

"I didn't ask for this job," he growled, and then fell silent. The shuttlecar found its way toward the very center of the galaxy: the home of AusCorp.**AusCorp was based inside the Great Collapsar at the Galactic Core, a black hole so large that you don't really get turned into spaghetti on the way in. Garry had stolen the idea for the location from a book by Robert Forward.Garry's reasoning was that since the interior area of a black hole is rather difficult to measure the company would save lots of money on federal property tax.Since the construction bills had driven AusCorp into Chapter Eleven this advantage had proven to be ephemeral at best.

Chapter 6

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, I THINK I'M GOING TO CRY

The ship skipped past the event horizon of the Great Collapsar. Garry reached into the back seat and shoved the gremlin awake before turning his attention to landing.

Gremlin stared out at the panorama with bleary eyes. As the corporate cityscape stretched outward, it seemed to curve up, forming the interior of a ball the size of Texas. Since the place had no sky it had no skyscrapers, but there were hundreds of colossal buildings: brilliant towers of multicolored light. The shuttlecar began to plunge toward the tallest, a structure of terrifying dimension that looked like Los Angeles rolled into a cone.

"This looks like a Dyson sphere," yawned Gremlin cannily.

"Yeah," said Garry, "but if you dug straight down you'd end up overhead — oh, cripes, why is pinnacle five on fire?"

He guided the shuttle past a cheerfully blazing spire into an enormous garage and parked by the attendant's office.

"Ralph? You here?" called Garry, stepping out of the car.

"Yessir, Mr. Auslander!" said Ralph, emerging from the office. He was carrying a large notebook labeled Garage Duty Log. It was full of poems and essays, but nobody needed to know that. It also contained all sorts of secret AusCorp information; Ralph had been Garry's unofficial attache ever since the latter decided that running the company from his office was a mistake.

"Ralph, what the hell happened to pinnacle five? It's in flames."

"A minor problem with your particle beam printer, sir," said Ralph. "Or so I hear."

"Oh," said Garry, blushing. Another invention gone awry. "Any messages for me?"

Ralph looked in his notebook. "The President called. Half of this arm of the galaxy has been annihilated."

"I know, I know!" said Garry. "I'm working on it! Look, I've got to go do some research. Is there anything else important?"

"No, sir," Ralph said. "No word about your case against the insurance company. Will there be anything else, sir?"

"Run my shuttlecar through the Probability Pump," said Garry. "I came thirty thousand lightyears in 100 minutes. I don't want to lose this car too." He gave Ralph a few more instructions and then turned around. "Gremlin, I'm going to my office. Do you want to come along? — Grem?"

The gremlin had disappeared. Typical, mused Garry. Gremlin seemed unable to stay still. Made for no end of trouble — look at all the difficulties in rescuing the little blue devil from Gottfried Plenora, back in 1940. But there was no time for nostalgia. Garry discarded the thought train and went off to take care of more important matters, or what he mistakenly considered to be more important matters.

In fact, Ralph's task was the most important event taking place in the entire corporation, not excluding the bowling tournament on level 42. Failing to dump the p-charge from the popdrive on Garry's car would have disastrous consequences. Ralph wasn't sure what they were, but he did know that if he didn't take the car down to the Probability Pump (connected in some esoteric way to the singularity at the heart of the complex), some fundamental laws of nature would get fundamentally snitted....

Chapter 7

OF THE STORY, NOT THE BANKRUPTCY CODE

Gremlin stopped walking and stared around at the unending, luxuriously carpeted and featureless corridors. There weren't even any landmarks, just a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. No sign of a wall communicator, either.

Gremlin sighed. Here was a peerless opportunity to send the galaxy's largest conglomerate into a fit of corporate dysentery and he couldn't find his way to a vulnerable spot.

He felt a bit guilty for a moment. Garry was a friend...but... "No," he decided. "The will of Th'Raet**In Th'Raet, the religion student does not necessarily find a figure of extraordinary, supernatural, walking-on-water qualities. His stature can be compared to that of a pre-Mahayana Buddha or of Confucius: he was a great being and left a great legacy, but he's just not the creator of the Universe. Neither is he an offspring of that creator, at least not more than anyone else is. An instrument, though? Perhaps. A tailored, custom creation of? Perhaps. "My body is God's body, my mind is God's mind, my spirit is God's spirit. My Sijra is yours," Th'Raet explains in Kap-Nid Do'Sijra, the gremlin theological text. The title translates into "Mechanisms of the Wheel of Fortune"; and while the nature of Sijra is multifold, it is important to note that it involves the way gremlins perceive the universe around them. It is within the context of Sijra that Th'Raet introduces the concept of imperfection as the source of all creation, and discusses the folly of attempts to achieve perfection; particularly, human attempts to achieve technological perfection through scientific investigation. These attempts, according to Th'Raet, must be retarded for the benefit of all concerned. Since human scientific investigation in terms of gremlin research generally seems to involve vivisection, it is easy to see why he said this.-- from "El-Ahara: Motives, Methods and Meanings" (2133) by Godfrey Plenora III must prevail. First, do harm."

He took the next left turn and came to a dead end. It wasn't a blank wall, though: strangely, the hall ended with an inset bookcase, complete with a brass candle-holder at its upper right.

"I wonder," said Gremlin. Visions of countless old movies flashed before his eyes, and, stretching up on tiptoe, he took hold of the candle-holder and experimentally pulled down.

The bookcase rotated ninety degrees top to bottom, dumped all the books onto the floor and collapsed.

"Hm," said Gremlin noncommittally. Then he shrugged, stepped over the fallen bookcase and advanced into the darkness, feeling his way along the wall. He came to a left turn, and a chill breeze swept his bare skin. He moved toward the source of the wind and plunged headlong down a ventilation shaft.

He was philosophical about it until he hit the grate at the end.

Chapter 8

OR MAYBE IT WAS ONE OF THOSE WEEKS

Garry finished dusting his desk and started on the chair. His office was a mess, as always. Why doesn't the cleaning staff ever... Oh, yes; the handprint lock — on a door that could stop anything short of an armed insurrection — might have something to do with it. He wondered why AusCorp made nothing that eliminate dust. Then he remembered that AusCorp made lots of things that eliminated dust, but that they were...excessively enthusiastic about it.

Garry settled into the extremely fake leather chair**For those interested in interior decorating costs of the 23rd century, the authors pass along the following information concerning Garry's office.• Series 9000 HyperDesk® by Execumatic, simulated mahogany. $80,000.• Carpet by Crawlers®. $89,250. Each one takes a single craftsman 5 years to make, but no one knows why.• Wall by Maude Linn Natural Grain Building Concepts. $300,000.• Door by Aperture Associates. $9,995 (purchased on sale, Sears Brand Central®). and activated his computer. The Pravetz's holographic screen appeared in the air above the desktop and Garry was about to punch up information on Cyrus Rainer (even though he didn't feel like it) when he was distracted by some pending mail.

One was a note from the legal department:

Despite our best efforts, you still have no case against your insurance company. The implosion of the shuttlecar was unmistakably due to probability charge rebound. Since the Law of Conservation of Probability was to blame, the implosion qualifies as an Act of God. Tough luck, boss.

"Damn that fine print!" said Garry. But there was nothing to be done. He deleted the message and went on to the next, which was a project funding request from the hyperphysics department.

"Given recent breakthroughs in superstring theory," Garry read aloud, "it may be possible to develop some type of superthread that could be used to repair rips in the fabric of space-time. Only $15 million for a study. Possibilities are awesome."

Sounded like a boondoggle. He toggled to the back page. There was a check-mark in the "Boondoggle" box. "I admire honesty," said Garry, signing his approval.

The bastards behind the Virtual Space Management project hadn't filled in the boondoggle box. He should have fired the lot of them, assuming he hadn't. Stupid idea anyway, turning the contents of the glove compartment into virtual particles... Cost too much to be saleable, even if they'd ever worked out the bugs. He'd lost an autographed copy of The Last Dangerous Visions, and then the Probability Pump broke down and — and the rest didn't bear thinking about.

The screen lit up with a half-dozen more project funding requests. Garry opened a pack of marshmallows and went to work.

Two hours, three bags of marshmallows, thirteen proposals and one billion dollars later, Garry remembered he was supposed to be doing reseach on who Cyrus Rainer was. He half-started to access the AusCorp data banks but couldn't seem to find the energy. Doing business was always terribly exhausting. He removed a pill bottle from the upper right-hand desk drawer, hoping to find some uppers, but found only a few downers and a bummer.

He opened the lower right-hand desk drawer and dropped the bottle alongside a couple of scientific references. One was his copy of The New Physics: Axiomatic and Non-Axiomatic Systems Of Teleological Control Functions, With Attention To The Law Of Conservation Of Probability, a rather difficult book that had sold perhaps ten copies, nine of which ended up in the hands of people who could understand it.

Garry relied on a modest popularization titled Physics Without Physics.

He grabbed the latter and opened it at random. For a moment he stared at a chart that claimed to compare the atomic decay rates of Uranium-238 and Polysorbate-80.

He threw the book down and folded his arms with a mixture of frustration and ennui. "Maybe I'll feel batter after a nap," he thought. "Half an hour or so..."

He reclined the chair, fell asleep almost instantly, and proceeded to have a horrible nightmare about telepop reporters from around the galaxy barging into his office demanding answers. This was entirely possible, although given that the galaxy was about 290 quadrillion miles in radius it might seem otherwise.

("Why haven't you done anything about Cyrus Rainer?" the reporters cried.

"Why haven't you?" Garry replied.)

Six hours of restless sleep later, Garry awoke to the sound of klaxons. The Pravetz's screen, flashing from hot red to ice blue, had little animated skulls rolling across it.

"Uh oh," said Garry. He jabbed the Event Queue hotbutton on his desk, and the most recent problem — event — to pass the sensors popped up on the screen.

The galaxy had been annihilated by Cyrus Rainer.

"Oh, crap!" said Garry.

"Oh, crap!" said Garry.

"What am I gonna do?" said Garry, contemplating the ruins of the Milky Way, or rather the lack thereof.

Immediately after saying that, something stirred in the back of his mind. He opened the desk drawer again. A few minutes of careful searching and a few seconds of dumping its contents all over the floor produced a pile of unidentifiable junk**Not entirely true. The pile included:• A copy of the June 1953 issue of STARTLING STORIES;• Three pages from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus;• A warranty registration card that bore no hint as to what it was from;• Five pen caps, sans pens;• A set of screwdrivers;• A tissue;• A clothespin;• A five inch statue of a heroic-looking white mouse wearing an eye patch;• A Tesla globe (not working); and• An adapter, although of sufficiently obscure utility that this classification is purely conjectural.Garry didn't believe in being prepared for everything; just the occasional bizarre occurence. and a silver sphere the size of a tennis ball. On one end of the sphere was a grenade pin; on the other, a label:

"Hey, great!" said Garry. He pulled at the pin. It didn't move. He pushed it and it still didn't move. He tried twisting it and the ball sheared apart, scattering little bits of broken metal everywhere.

"Aaah, phooey," he said, belatedly remembering that the Helpfinder team had checked the Boondoggle box. He folded his arms in annoyance.

"It's not my fault, dammit!" he spat. "If they want to keep their planets from being blown up they should defend them!"

The Event Queue monitor still displayed the annoying fact of the total annihilation of the Milky Way. After a while it added that Andromeda had gone as well. Without leaving a trace. No rubble. No energy. Not even a mouse.

These events were unfortunate. They were also outright impossible, which meant that somewhere the piper was making out his bill...and when he got around to adding the suggested mandatory tip, there would be trouble.

Chapter 9

HOSPITAL WHITES AND GREMLIN'S BLUES

Gremlin opened an eye warily. He saw a blur that clarified into a wall with an oil portrait of Garry on it, above a nameplate that read simply, "Our Man". His stomachs rumbled.

"Ah, you're conscious!" came a familiar voice from the general direction of "below". It was Ralph's. "Welcome to the AusCorp medical facility."

Gremlin hopped out of bed and fell**Like a rag doll. onto the floor. "What the hell happened?" he said weakly. "What are you doing here? What am I doing here?"

Ralph picked him up**Also like a rag doll. and put him in a chair.**What? "I'm here because I was passing by the Main Control Room when you, ah, dropped in. — Which is why you're here," he added, wheeling the inevitable tray of hospital food over to Gremlin. "You can leave as soon as you like, by the way. Your broken bones have all been repaired."

"Main Control Room?" thought Gremlin, and wept a strong silent tear. "What's this?" he said, picking at a blob of browned — well, brown. It didn't taste too bad, but that didn't mean anything. Nature has a depraved sense of humor in the area of taste, as anyone can tell by the fact that sugar tastes good while natural oat bran muffins taste like upholstery.

"I don't know what it is," said Ralph, "but to me it tastes like upholstery."

"Must be an oat bran muffin," mumbled Gremlin, chewing valiantly.**In fact it was a Kreamy Granola Puff® made by Maude Linn Natural Grain Industries. Its main selling points were a field-tested shelf life of five thousand years and — after five thousand years on the shelf — a tensile strength six times greater than duraplasteel.

Ralph waited until Gremlin was finished, and then said "Incidentally, the destruction outside has grown worse."

He told Gremlin just how much worse.

"Th'Raet! The whole galaxy?"

"Indeed."

Gremlin gulped down a glass of something white and bolted from the room. "I'll handle this!" he called over his shoulder.

Gremlin hurried through the labyrinth of AusCorp hallways, paying just enough attention to the humans around him to tell that something was seriously wrong — well, that went without saying, but even so — and in no time at all became lost. He stared around at the suddenly empty halls, cursing his stupidity for not asking directions.

"Where the hell am I?" he cried with resignation.

A wall lit up with a sign that read YOU ARE HERE.

"Thanks a lot," said Gremlin. "Not exactly helpful, but very Zen."

The wall turned a pale shade of pink and presented a map of AusCorp HQ. It didn't help. The diagram looked like Piet Mondrian's interpretation of the layout of the New York City subway system.**It was. There were tax reasons for this, but no-one understood them.

"Thanks," sighed Gremlin. "Can you — how do I get to Garry's office?"

The wall looked uncertain, but the ceiling said "Follow the corridor and take the next left turn."

Chapter 10

SUCH A KNIFE GUY THOUGH

Garry was working on his novel when Gremlin walked in.**Whenever anyone asked Garry what his book was about, he always told them it was the story of a Thessalonian monk from Nevada who wins an outrageous amount of money in a sweepstakes and proceeds to have many exciting adventures with Vatican spies and puts a stop to any variety of extraterrestrial plots against the world. This was in fact the case.

Gremlin's eyes bulged. In the realm of humans, Gremlin had always considered Garry a cut above the rest, but it was beginning to look as though a rather dull knife had been involved.

"Garry, the galaxy's been destroyed!" cried Gremlin.

"Just a second, Grem," said Garry, punching keys tentatively, "I think I'm on to something about the human condition."**What he was actually trying to write was a Meaningful Novel, the kind of book that the New York Times Book Review could trumpet as "a vivid, vital document of biting satire." He failure was so intense as to provoke false memory syndrome in footnotes. After seven hundred pages he had no idea how to end the book; he was toying with a total thermonuclear war in the year 2001, but was slightly hampered by the fact that it had not occurred.

Gremlin had a sudden horrible feeling that if someone told Garry he was having trouble seeing the forest for the trees he'd have them all cut down.

A voice erupted from the communicator on Garry's desk.

"This is Cyrus Rainer. What the hell has been keeping you, Auslander?"

"I've been busy," said Garry automatically.

"Oh for crying out loud !" said Rainer. "I disappear every scrap of matter in the Milky Way and — don't you even want to know what I've done with the President's daughter?"

"What have you done with the President's daughter?" said Garry absently. He looked around for his copy of STORY by Robert McKee,**All right! He was really writing a screenplay! Are you happy now? Sue me for trying to save him some dignity! and only after not finding it moved on to vaguely wondering how the transmission was reaching into the building, and then clapped a hand to his pocket. The little white popmitter box he'd found was still there. Aha.

"Nothing. Never mind. She's downstairs watching Gone With The Wind," said Rainer. "Why am I calling? You're the biggest disappointment of them all, you know that? Well, so what. Another twelve hours and it won't matter. Drop dead. Why do I bother?"

The connection broke.

"Well?" demanded Gremlin.

Garry sat down, sagging into his chair like the bag of garbage Gremlin was beginning to consider him to be.

"Well, hell," said Garry. He pulled the box from his pocket and tossed it to Gremlin. "See that box? I bet I could track him down with it, but I don't feel like it. I have had it with saving people, running around, getting mugged. I've finally realized it's no fun. Let the police handle it."

"Fun?" exclaimed Gremlin. "Fun ? You have a responsibility --"

"Responsibility, my ass," interrupted Garry. "This is a big galaxy, Grem. I haven't gotten any help from anybody except you, and I'm sick of it. Here, look at this." Garry punched commands and made a display of AusCorp's finances in the air: income and expenditure projections for the current quarter. Income was listed in steady white characters. Expenditures flashed hysterically in red. "Notice the debt ratio? This company's going down the tubes for one reason. Me. It isn't the Federal Navy that tracks down Arth Warriors, and it isn't the Feds who get the bills for the damages that happen to occur!" Garry was seething. "Who do you suppose they'd send the bills to if I just walked up to the Arthies and said go ahead, take over the galaxy ?"

"The galaxy doesn't exist any more," said Gremlin.

"Doesn't matter, I was speaking rhetorically."

"Garry, the galaxy's been destroyed!" insisted Gremlin.

"You keep saying that," said Garry. "What do you expect me to do about it?"

"Time travel!" said Gremlin. "You didn't seem to have any trouble getting back to 1940 and then here!"

"Grem, we've been over this," said Garry. "Traveling forward is easy enough." He raised his right index finger to make a point. A moth landed on it. He stared critically at the moth until it flew away in embarrassment. "Traveling back," he continued semi-truthfully, "is not something to do casually. I still don't remember how I did it, other than by driving into that singularity, and I'm not about to try it again until I've got no other choice."

Gremlin pointed at the Event Queue speechlessly.

"Well, yes," said Garry, "but for all I know that's an illusion. Remember, I took philosophy in college." He took on a pensive look. "You know, as far as my personal responsibility goes...umm...I've got a bunch of back issues of the Journal of Axiology around here someplace...there was an article..." He started rummaging in his desk again.

Gremlin seized on the man's sole apparent interest. "What about AusCorp?" he asked.

"Like you said, what about it?"

"Your employees are beginning to panic, you know. They're gathering in the garage for a meeting, from what I heard in the halls."

Garry looked at the ceiling. "Oh, hell. Trouble in paradise. Guess I'd better go check them out."

Gremlin followed Garry out the door, flabbergasted. "The man is totally out to lunch," he thought.

He was wrong. The man had never come back from breakfast.

Chapter 11

STILL NOT THE BANKRUPTCY CODE

Garry felt a twinge of guilt as he surveyed the garage. The entire area was packed with AusCorp employees whose homes had been annihilated. They were incredibly upset.**See "How To Profit From The Homeless" by K.C. Rove in the current issue of MODERN KAKISTOCRAT.

Ralph emerged from his office looking concerned. "The employees are incredibly upset, sir," he said. "I wonder why?"

"The galaxy's been destroyed, Ralph," said Garry.

"So I've heard," said Ralph. "I take it you want a ship, then?"

"Well," said Garry, and paused. Getting away from the office seemed to have cleared his head a bit. "Why not. How about the Desideratum?"

"I regret to say it's not available, sir. We had a little problem with that new metal cleaning fluid you invented."

"Oh," said Garry. "Then prep the Miniver Cheevy and have it ready in...an hour?"

He turned to Gremlin. "Grem, if you've got any last minute business to attend to, hop to it. I suppose we should go see Cyrus Rainer."

Garry padded to the nearest wall and pushed a few buttons, causing a panel to slide open. He took a microphone from the revealed compartment and walked over to the general area of the door.

"OK, people," he said, "I know we have a bad situation here, what with the galaxy being destroyed, but we can't let that get us down..."

Gremlin slipped out of the garage while Garry was talking. He could only hope the man would stay put.

"...well, granted, your families are probably all dead," continued Garry, "but you've got to look at the bright side. I'm sure I'll be able to, er..."

He looked around worriedly. The surrounding crowd was turning surly. Garry began to feel he was losing control of the situation. But how could he exercise his authority while face to face with the employees? He couldn't think of a way, and his copy of The One-Minute Dictator was back in his office.

He wanted to teleport the hell out of there, but of course he couldn't.

He wished he'd kept up the pressure on the teleporter design team. But the company psychologist said that would hinder their creativity...

"Psychology...?" he thought. "Maybe...I can cheer them up?"

Chapter 12

SHOP TILL YOU DROP, OR THE OTHER SHOE DOES, OR SOMETHING ALONG THOSE LINES

As Gremlin walked through AusCorp's Gift Shop, which was located next door to the garage, he almost wished he had never activated that distress signal.

But things were going in the right direction now. Garry was in the garage, he was going to do something, and everything was going to be fine. All Gremlin had to do was pick up some supplies, get Garry into the ship and go confront Cyrus Rainer. Problem solved.

Um.

He grabbed an AusCorp backpack and began to fill it with utility items. Fortunately, the gift shop had everything: food, water, clothing, tools, miscellaneous electronics, explosives, a selection of current magazines... Wait a minute. Didn't this place carry GQ? Apparently not. Darn.

Gremlin winced as he passed a rack of t-shirts. Each of the shirts had an AusCorp logo on the back and a spiffy picture of a grinning Garry on the front. Still, they were priced to move.

Gremlin sighed and, fully equipped, emerged into the garage ready for anything.

Except...except possibly to see Garrett M. Auslander standing on the roof of a shuttlecar, trying to lead a singalong of the company song. Which was, tragically but not unexpectedly, exactly what he was doing.

Little voices began screaming in Gremlin's head. A few were chanting lyrics from Oklahoma! but most were saying "Stop him!"

Gremlin dodged through a sea of legs: diving, bobbing, weaving, climbing, hoping like hell he could make it to the top before it was too late. Actually it had pretty much been too late from word one, but he had to make the attempt.

Garry finished the last verse and looked at the confused crowd. Somehow they weren't reacting the way he'd hoped they would. Maybe it was the company song; he'd always thought it lacked enthusiasm.**THE AUSCORP COMPANY SONG(lyrics: G. Auslander; music: a matter of opinion)AusCorp, shining bright like the sun,AusCorp, we are always the one!We make the world a better place,so spread the word throughout known space,that AusCorp is the companythat's like a home to you...and me! He punched buttons, trying to arrange something a little more up-tempo. "You all know this one," said Garry, "so feel free to join in."

He pressed one last button. It made a click exactly like the one you hear just before you realize that Russian Roulette is simply not your game.

The opening chords of "Old Time Rock And Roll" sounded.

"T@k3 th0s3 01d r3c0rds 0ff th3 sh31f --"

The crowd, having finally realized that not only had Garry stood by doing nothing while the galaxy was being destroyed but showed no signs of doing anything about it now or in the future, took one step forward.

Garry paused.

Considered his options.

Ran like hell. The crowd, which might have responded to Johnny Mathis, poured out the door after him, leaving Gremlin and Ralph alone in the garage.

Gremlin dropped to his knees. "No!" he cried, pummeling the floor with his fists. "No! He got away!"

"Mr. Auslander is perfectly safe," said Ralph. "There are hidden passages throughout the complex, known only to him." (Gremlin could dispute that.) "He's in no danger," Ralph concluded. (Gremlin did dispute that.)

"Oh yes he is," said Gremlin, and rose, grinning evilly.

Chapter 14

OR POSSIBLY THIRTEEN, BUT HEY! WHO'S COUNTING?

Ralph the Garage Attendant sat at the navigator's station on the bridge of the Miniver Cheevy chewing on the end of his pencil. Some time had passed since Garry had told him to prep the ship for launch and have it ready in one hour. Six hours, to be exact. Ralph found this inspiring.

"Garrett is," he wrote, and then scratched it out. He thought for a moment and then continued.

"A great man," he wrote, "is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill."

(As they say, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.)

He closed his notebook. There'd be time to finish the essay later. Right now he had to get Garry's shuttlecar and stow it aboard.

Ralph thought about the strange circumstances he was in. In all the years he'd spent working at AusCorp he'd never seen Garry like this. When the Spatial Rupture of 2277 occurred, Garry hadn't hesitated to pilot rescue ships in and out of the area at great risk to himself. Why, he even supplied coffee and donuts to the victims free of charge. And when Helmut Regenbogen tried to seize control of Congress through mind control, Garry was there to stop him even at the risk of a boiled brain.**He escaped intact, despite rumors to the contrary.

"So perhaps he can be forgiven the occasional lapse," thought Ralph, and paused to consider this given the current circumstances. "—Okay, maybe not."

Chapter 14

THE AUDIENCE CAN'T TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS, CAPTAIN

When Garry emerged into his office from a secret passage he found another slew of pending documents and events on his computer screen. Bills, mainly.

He owed — formerly owed, really — $200,000 to a department store for damages incurred during the Telman Incident. $435,000 to Mrs. Agnes Finchwater of Clogged Squirrel, Arizona for the destruction of her house, even though the Arth Warriors were at fault. And it seemed that the insurance company was — had been — countersuing him in the matter of the Beetle and the Virtual Space Management project.

Also, the entire local cluster of galaxies had been annihilated. He refused to feel guilty about it.

"Why," he said to the walls, "didn't anyone do anything about the local cluster? I mean, that's a big chunk of real estate. We're talking a few quadrillion stars! And nobody does anything about it? Not even any aliens?

"Not my fault," decided Garry, in the teeth of the evidence**In the local cluster, well over 39,000,000 intelligent races had risen to the intellectual level of discovering the theoretical impossibility of traveling faster than the speed of light. 39,000,000 races since the beginning of time — yet only humankind ever figured out the poptech way around the problem. Mainly because humans alone had invented that most useful of concepts: cheating.Since the stars were out of reach for everyone else, most aliens took up transcendental religion and eventually progressed beyond reality altogether. The remainder took up gardening but achieved much the same result.Consequently, the only entities — oh, call them people — to be held responsible for the destruction of the local cluster were humans. Semi-specifically, Garrett M. Auslander. — and put his playlist of sad songs on the omniphonic sound system. At some point he started to sing along. Then he stopped and put his feet up on his desk. Then he started again.

The desk rested on a luxurious carpet, which ran from the wall behind him to the door in front of him. Taped to the far side of the door was a contact microphone connected to a digital signal enhancer, which in turn was connected to the AusCorp communications system.

Also taped to the door was a pale orange tooth: the calling card of a gremlin of the fourth Id'Hri.

The gremlin was very, very annoyed, and wanted to fill the halls of AusCorp with music...and, more importantly, the voice of Garry singing woefully:

"8@by cr13d th3 d@y th3 c1rcus c@m3 t0 t0wn..."

Chapter 15

THE PRICE WE PAY FOR FREEDOM IS ETERNAL INDIGESTION

Gremlin dashed through the garage doors, bounced across the floor and skittered up the ladder into the Miniver Cheevy's airlock.

"It's done," he panted. "Are you ready?"

Ralph scanned his checklist. "Yes," he said, "I stored the shuttlecar just before you arrived."

"To your post, then, pilot!" said Gremlin cheerfully, and Ralph headed to the bridge.

Seconds passed.

At the minute mark the singing that echoed through the empty garage stopped abruptly. At one minute and five seconds there was a faint thud, like that of a chair flying over backward onto a thick carpet; then a slam, like the abrupt shutting of a secret exit. At one minute thirteen there was a much larger crash, not unlike the sound of someone's door being broken in by an armed insurrection; and, finally, at one minute eighteen, a sound exactly like that of an armed insurrection finding a secret exit.

Gremlin giggled maniacally; then he winced and patted his stomachs.**When the U.S. War Department's Dr. Gottfried Plenora sliced open a gremlin in 1940 and discovered the creature's digestive system included two stomachs — the second having evolved eons before to handle the acid attacks brought on by living around human beings — his new-found knowledge didn't keep B-24's or the odd squadron of Navy Avengers from dropping out of the sky. Far from it. Plenora had made the mistake of cutting up the grandson of Sul'Pidra, head of the gremlins' Spectral Council, and the subtle but vicious retaliation that followed made Hitler's blitzkriegs look like rainy afternoons.The grandson's name was Ch'Kari.Life for humans became more and more hellish until the year 2000, when Garrett M. Auslander did some research on the gremlin problem. Throwing caution to the dogs, he drove a highly modified Volkswagen Beetle into a singularity and somehow managed to rescue the grandson before he met his fate. This act so pleased the Spectral Council that they issued him a medal and agreed to re-evaluate their view of the human race.Dr. Plenora hadn't appreciated it, though. Thanks to the continuing emigration of gremlins from Earth and funding cutbacks brought on by World War II his research on gremlin biology ground to a halt, and so he never got an answer to the question, or even got a chance to ask the question: how can two stomachs, roughly equal in size and operation to human stomachs, be crammed into such small bodies and still work right?Gremlin could have given the answer easily: they can't and so they don't.

At two minutes and fifty-five seconds, Garrett Michael Auslander burst through the door to the garage like a man being pursued by demons armed with Uzis. Indiana Jones couldn't have kept up with him as he made a beeline for the Miniver Cheevy. He was halfway across the garage, and it was a big garage, when hundreds of AusCorp employees, some armed with Uzis, began flooding through the door.

Still running, Garry cast one bright white look over his shoulder and leaped the last ten feet to the Miniver Cheevy's airlock. He scrambled up the ladder and Gremlin slammed the airlock door as soon as Garry climbed in. "Ralph, get us out of here!" Gremlin cried into the communicator, and then turned his attention to Garry.

"Gad!" gasped the red-faced Garry, wiping his sweating face with a sleeve, "The ingrates! How could they!"

Gremlin waved the white popmitter box at Garry. "How do we use this to track Rainer?" he asked. "And where's the bathroom on this crate?"

"Just stick it in the popcom," panted Garry. "If Rainer's still got the other half of the particle pair it'll lead you right to him. Ask Ralph for the details. I haven't the faintest idea where the bathroom is."

Garry's eyes crossed, glazed and then closed as he fainted from exhaustion just as the Miniver Cheevy popped out of the confines of AusCorp.

Gremlin thought this was just as well; it would save the bother of having to hunt him down again.

"Oooh," said Gremlin, "I shouldn't have eaten that hospital food!" He groaned and pattered off in a hurry, holding his tummies tenderly.

Garry lay in a crumpled, unconscious heap on the floor.

After a while Ralph came around and put him to bed.

Chapter 16

NEVER TRY TO TELL A GREMLIN ABOUT INTESTINAL FORTITUDE

The Miniver Cheevy was a marvel of postmodern high technology. The result of a unique joint venture by thirty-seven companies, it was remarkable from its unbeatable Midas 409® quasi-engine to its luxury bathrooms, and embodied the hopes and dreams of its makers in a way few ships had ever done.

Garry had bought it at the bankruptcy auction for fifty dollars.**In fact the ship's appalling construction costs had bankrupted only half the companies involved, but the other half had sadly gotten caught up in the resulting maze of litigation, a maze so tortuous in fact that everyone involved was quite relieved when the galaxy was destroyed. He'd never paid much attention to it before, and at the moment he was too unconscious to think of the possibilities of his beautiful ship. Gremlin wasn't much interested in the ship either, but at least he had an excuse.

"Th'Raet do-kla!**Not every footnote is relevant, I'm afraid. This had better be the bathroom!"

The last door, unopened for years, squealed open to the accompaniment of the noises of Gremlin's digestive system. Though his plumbing was doing its beleaguered best with the hospital-issue Kreamy Granola Puff, in moments it would give up and push the stuff on through, hoping the supervisors wouldn't notice.

Most of a row of fluorescent light-tubes flickered to unhealthy bluish life as Gremlin entered. Dead flies and dust decorated the fixture and the rest of the room was so disgusting Gremlin thought he had been transported to a gas station in the Bronx.

But what the hell — it was a bathroom!

Gremlin sat and thought about the rooms he'd seen...mainly about the reactor rooms. So many pretty blinking things, so many twinkling lights! They called to him, begged him to come and mess them up creatively and humorously. He gritted his teeth and furrowed his brow.

"On the way back," he said — and was suddenly gripped by a chilling realization.

He'd forgotten to bring a magazine.

"All I ask is a copy of GQ..." Gremlin whimpered, holding his head in his hands.

Poink.

From a hitherto nonexistent magazine rack in the wall popped the latest issue of Gremlin's Quarterly.

"Hey, what's going on here?" said Gremlin, staring around wildly.

Poink. A colorful pamphlet popped up next to the magazine. Gremlin took it from the rack with a bemused look on his face.

WELCOME ABOARD!

You are one of the lucky few to experience the convenience and luxury of a Euphemism Technologies® AutoJohn® programmable restroom!

Only AutoJohn has these amazing features:

• Complete access to ALL periodicals!

• Laser-based decontamination for NoWorry® protection!

• Nev'R-RunOut® sanitary tissues!

• Total reconfigurability to your choice of locales! Want to experience Napoleon's bathroom? Karl Rove's? Just say "Reprogram!" and name your facility! Every major restroom from Trenton to Trantor is in memory and yours on demand!

ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS ASK!

This, thought he, is an insurmountable opportunity.

Chapter 17

IN WHICH GARRY REALIZES HIS LIFE IS NOT SO MUCH A DISASTER AS YOUR ACTUAL DISGALAXY

Garry woke up in his stateroom and blinked in a confused way at the canopy over the bed. There was a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling on it; at one-sixteenth scale this was less than impressive.

He dragged himself out of the bed and over to what looked to be an omniphonic sound system. There was a box of music d-packs**The digital data pack (d-pack) was the currently ultimate information storage medium. The ultimately ultimate information storage medium was an unreleased AusCorp product, the Quark Encoded Memory Module. Garry was undecided about marketing it: on one hand, the realization that the sum total of human knowledge would fit into a block so small that it was actually physically impossible not to lose might critically damage mankind's feelings of self-worth; on the other hand, it would probably make a hellacious amount of money... on top of the pseudo-pine system enclosure. He inspected a d-pack of Jerry Goldsmith's classic score to Star Trek V**The Wrath of God, with Ricardo Montalban., put it down and then went to the window. He opened the shade and stared out the duraplasteel window at the stars, feeling depressed. He became even more depressed when the stars disappeared, as every last photon was vacuumed up by...who knew what? For a long moment he stared into the infinitely deep blackness-beyond-blackness. Then, suddenly and without warning, the full impact of what he'd done (or failed to do) didn't hit him like a sledgehammer because there just weren't any sledgehammers big enough.

He let loose a heartrending moan that encompassed the universe. This was not difficult given the current state of the universe, but still would have annoyed Shakespeare.**"AND bloody Fortinbras...!"

Chapter 18

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, WHAT AM I DOING IN HERE? WHAT DO YOU THINK I'M DOING IN HERE?

"Reprogram: Jackson Pollock! …Oh, wow!"

One might expect the exploration of the artistic expressions of human hygiene to blur into a muddle of too many right angles, solid gold fixtures and olive-drab wallpaper — and it had very nearly been the case, until Ch'Kari had stumbled across the entry for Marcel Duchamp and subsequently discovered that someone at Euphemism Technologies had been indulging himself in artistic speculation: all mankind's artists, both visual and literary, were represented in terms of their work. He'd spent an hour on the cubists alone.

Some bathrooms had magazine racks. This one had MoMA and the Met with a side order of the Library of Congress. The only disappointment had been that Stanislaw Lem and Jorge Luis Borges had the same entry.

And to think it was all mainly an illusion imposed on the sensory centers of his brain, especially given that the processors were designed for interface with humans, but that's what the restroom technical manual he'd called for had said. (The technology would have done wonders for computer interfaces, but the rights were in dispute — were formerly in dispute.) But, he decided, enough delight.

"Reprogram: null setting! No simulation!"

The room dissolved again into white and chrome. Gremlin wondered who had left it on Olde Bronx Gas Station. Garry?

Garry?

He knew he'd forgotten something.

"Oh, poo."

Chapter 19

THIS CHAPTER HEADING INTENTIONALLY LEFT VOID

The last corporate president in the Universe sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door. He didn't answer it. Probably Jehovah's Witnesses anyway.

Garry stared blankly ahead, almost catatonic. His eyes were half-open and glazed, the pupils fixed and dilated. "Comfortably Numb" was not playing on the omni but it should have been.

Gremlin came through the door and scanned the room. The dust was settled, the carpet unruffled, and the clock-radio was blinking 12:00 AM. Gremlin knew how much Garry (and every other sentient being in the universe, come to think of it) hated that, so he knew Garry was out of it, whatever "it" was.

"Dammit, Garry, snap out of it!" he said. Garry's jaw slowly slid open, allowing a puddle of drool to form on his lounging-around jacket, which was ironically modeled after Napoleon's dress uniform coat.

Gremlin was upset by this.**By Garry's condition, not his jacket. Although Gremlin didn't approve of that, either.

Gremlin was rather fond of the Universe, and wanted it to live through this Rainer business — and Garry was the Universe's only hope.

"Hm, how do you jump-start a run-down brain?" wondered Gremlin. "Dianetics? Nah."

He ran back to the bathroom to get a copy of Jane's Guide to Human Anatomy. "B for brain," he murmured; "B for brain, B for —

"— Bathroom?"

Chapter 20

GREMLIN'S BRAIN LAUNDRY - 1 HR. CLEANING

Gremlin wired the electrodes to Garry's head and strung the cable down the stairs to the bathroom. He hooked the cable into the junction box, set up the walkie-talkie next to the voice recognizer, checked all the connections and ran back upstairs.

"Last chance, Garry!" he said. Garry stared ahead, ignoring him at best. Gremlin took a deep breath, braced himself and threw the power switch.

ZAP! Garry's eyes bugged wide as his brain was introduced violently to the bathroom's CPU. Gremlin thumbed the TALK button on the walkie-talkie and yelled:

"Reprogram: Hunter S. Thompson!"

Garry screamed.**"Aaaahhh!"

Gremlin let him suffer a full thirty seconds before severing the connection.

Garry bounded out of the chair, arms flailing, eyes bulging, lips frothing white. He grabbed the little blue man and shook him violently.

"Gremlin! I want every dirty trick you can come up with, pronto! Get up to the bridge and tell Ralph to get this rustbucket moving. Arm all weapons, divert all spare power to the shields, engage tactical systems!"

Gremlin stared at him.

"MOVE!" said Garry, tearing the electrodes from his head along with some skin. "NOW!" he yelled, ripping off his robe, standing revealed and resplendent in the blazing silver-white uniform of a Navy Reserve Fleet Captain as gouts of sparks and sprays of molten metal from the flaming walls formed a dazzling halo around him.**His pajamas, actually.

Gremlin considered the spectacle for a moment and then sensibly ran like hell, yelling "He's back!"

"By golly," said Garry, "I'm mad now! Destroy my universe, will he? I'll show him!" He slammed an angry fist against the wall communicator, shattering the plastic cover. "This is the Captain speaking. Red alert! All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill!"

He'd always wanted to say that.

Chapter 21

BLACKJACK

Klaxons blared and danger lights flashed as sleek black AusCorp BattleBots, their weapons pods flashing green with readylights, raced to their posts. Outside the ship long panels slid aside to reveal the hideous gaping maws of dozens of deadly Smith & Hamilton antimatter-torpedo guns, each with enough firepower to devastate a small child who'd only gotten a crummy Daisy® BB gun for Christmas, and the Miniver Cheevy's MirrorShields® came up with a throaty hum of energy sadly inaudible in space®.

"Ralph! Where the hell are you?" hollered Garry as he strapped a plasma projector to his back, tucked a few grenades in his pockets and gave his hair a final touchup with a handy blowdrier.

"Here, sir!" said Ralph, trotting up towing a wagon of blade weapons. Garry selected a 42-inch Eberhardt, stuffed it in his belt and bombed onto the bridge.

"Ralph," Garry commanded, "I want a full scan of Rainer's complex. Divert everything up to and including life support power to the remote sensors if you have to, but scope that place down to the quarks!"

"Aye, sir!" said Ralph, snapping a salute.

"Yes, you!" barked Garry. "Status report, Gremlin!"

Gremlin gestured at the viewscreen. "Estimating intercept in one point five minutes," he said. "All offensive and defensive systems check out optimal. And aren't you the tiger all of a sudden."

"Vorga, I kill you filthy," growled Garry. "Ralph! Where's that scan?"

"Coming up, sir," said Ralph, his agile fingers poking away at the controls like the Rockettes on amphetamines.

Garry stuck one foot up on the rail around the bridge and turned a steely brown eye on the image of Rainer's cubical complex that hung in blackness on the viewscreen. "Engage cloaking device! — Belay that," he added before anyone said the Miniver Cheevy had no cloaking device.

"Sir," said Ralph, "no defenses are active on that station." He handed Garry a printout. "No force shield, no sensor jamming, nothing. — I do read many SQUIDs in operation, but I cannot discern what they are doing."

Garry's brain whirled around in his stomach, fountained up his spinal column into his skull and jelled then and there.

"I know what they're doing!" said Garry, paling as the pieces fell together.

They'd have fallen together a hell of a lot sooner if he'd ever gotten around to running a search on the AusCorp data banks, or his diary for that matter.

"Son of a gun!" he said. "Cyrus Rainer! The guy in charge of the Virtual Space Management project! The guy who imploded my Beetle!"

He stared through his crew. "Virtual Space Management. If there's not enough room in your glove compartment, use a SQUID to force the contents into virtuality and then high energy potential vacuum. Only problem is you build up a P-charge like you wouldn't believe, and guess what happens when the rebound hits?

"Rainer's forced the entire Universe into high energy potential vacuum! He's built up a P-charge of — infinite proportion!" He stared at them wildly. "Quick! To the shuttle!" he yelled. "If we don't act now, there's going to be a full-scale reality implosion!"

The three ran for the shuttle at the speed of panic. Seconds later they were in the car, blasting towards Rainer's HQ at an appalling velocity. "Engaging emergency thrusters, afterburners, inertial compensators and battering ram," said Garry, flicking switches rapidly. "Hold on to your hats!"

The dashboard computer flashed "COLLISION DANGER! ABORT COURSE!". Garry whipped out a blaster and blew the control panel to bits.

"Maybe Hunter S. Thompson was a bad choice," thought Gremlin.

CRUNCH! The shuttlecar plowed into Rainer's station, lancing through the duraplasteel construction like a...lance, punching through floor after floor, shattering its way to the very center of the complex. It caromed into an atmosphere processing station and crashed to a thundrous stop.

Yes...only Fred Thompson could have been a worse choice.

Chapter 22

SAVING THE UNIVERSE IN THE NICK OF TIME

The first thought that went through Garry's mind after he regained consciousness was: "I've got to get those inertial compensators fixed."

The second thought was: "I wonder where?"

Garry dragged himself from the remains of the wrecked shuttlecar, ignoring the annoying swordslashes on his leg and the little voice that kept asking him why he hadn't worn a scabbard. "Well, scratch that car," he said morosely. Black despair washed over him: now he'd lost the only remaining object he'd cared about.

So much for the adrenaline rush.

Gremlin and Ralph emerged from the car. "Let's go," said Gremlin, leading Garry by the hand. Past control panels, doors, mysterious blinking machinery they trotted.

Fortunately, Ralph had brought along a detailed map of the complex.

They came at last to a vast hallway that shone cold bright white, featureless but for a scarlet and ebony door at the end, and they knew that this was their destination.

The door had a nameplate reading "Cyrus Rainer".

Garry took the 35 megawatt plasma projector from his back and halfheartedly blew the seventy-two-inch thick duraplasteel door off its hinges with one ravaging blast of multicolored energy. Molten metal splashed the floor and the curtains caught fire as they advanced into the room.

Cyrus Rainer looked up from his crossword puzzle. "Now…?" he choked. "Now you show up?" His face turned a fascinating shade of purple as he waved at the enormous digital clock behind him that was steadily counting toward zero...

00:00:05

"You...nincompoop," said Cyrus Rainer.

00:00:02

"So sue me," said Garry.

00:00:00

There was a sudden painful inbursting, then whiteness.

Chapter 23

NOT!

Lux Aeterna, actually.

"You've really done it now," said Gremlin.

Garry said nothing, but thought "Holy Deus Ex Machina!"

WRONG. I DIDN'T COME TO YOU, YOU CAME TO ME. YOU BROUGHT THE ENTIRE SYSTEM DOWN. EVERY COSMIC BUBBLE POPPED THANKS TO THE REPERCUSSIONS OF THAT ONE PROBABILITY IMPLOSION. EVERY UNIVERSE IN CREATION WAS REDUCED TO A NULL FIELD.

"I brought the system down?" said the amazed Garry. "It was Rainer's fault!"

YOU LET HIM DO IT.

"Is that what he says? Where is he, anyway?"

NOT RELEVANT. WHAT DID YOU WANT FROM THOSE PEOPLE? AN APOLOGY? THANKS? PRAISE? BEAR IN MIND THESE ARE RHETORICAL QUESTIONS.

Something snapped. "Of course that's what I wanted!" yelled Auslander. "All I do for them! Invasions, doomsday weapons, copyright violation, you name it, I handle it! And what do they do? They send me bills for property damage! They file complaints! — Do you know how many times I've been sued for saving them from Arth Warriors?"

YES. LET ME SHOW YOU SOMETHING.

An instant replay began. Twenty-odd years of life flashed before Garry's eyes. Not Garry's life — Gremlin's. It was really embarrassing. The little blue man had been chased, beaten, defenestrated and blown up much more often than Garry, but had never stopped striving to live constructively. Destructively. Both.

Then Garry's life flashed before his eyes. Up to a point it didn't compare too badly; the willingness to risk his own life for the benefit of others (humans, gremlins, the occasional crustacean) was admirable. But then along came the implosion, the denied claim, and so much for that sterling character. This wasn't embarrassing. It was humiliating.

GET THE PICTURE?

"Uh," said Garry. "Yes, I get the picture. Stop looking so damn virtuous, Gremlin."

NOW WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH YOU? BLOODY HELL!

"Oh, I hope not," said Garry fervently.

I COULD RESTORE A BACKUP OF EVERYTHING; BUT THE LOOP HAS TO BE BROKEN...

"I have an idea," said Gremlin, who had after all just been given one.

...AND DIRECT INTERVENTIONS ARE LIKE CHEATING AT MINESWEEPER...

"I have an idea," suggested Gremlin.

"But — you must be able to do something! you're, well...!" begged Garry.

YES, I'VE BEEN TOLD. HMM...

"I have an idea," offered Gremlin.

I WONDER WHAT IT COULD BE?

Gremlin whispered something.

WELL! WHY NOT?

"What?" said Garry, staring at Gremlin, who was grinning like the Cheshire Cat after eating Mickey Mouse. "What? What?"

YOU'LL SEE. — BY THE WAY, THIS IS GOING ON YOUR PERMANENT RECORD...

Chapter 24

ONE OF THOSE LIVES...

He finished his drink and paid the bill. "So that was fine. But then they denied my claim for the loss of my car just because the accident involved a SQUID. Act of God, they said. The ingrates. That was what bothered me. Not the money — I could write that off as an AusCorp business expense — the attitude."

Garry stumbled outside into the darkness and made his way over to his shuttlecar. He was about to stick his key into the lock when he noticed there was a piece of paper wedged in the door handle. He took the paper out and squinted at it in the dim light from the bar's front window...

It was a letter, and it read:

Dear Mr. Auslander,

I am not responsible for the implosion of your Volkswagen.

Yours faithfully,

God

CC: Trans-Gibraltar Insurance Co., Inc.

Garry...stopped.

And thought, and thought again.

He stared across the street at the offices of AusCorp where scattered office windows shone like stars.

"You're brilliant!" he yelled, for everyone and no-one to hear. "Brilliant! We'll file a suit qui tam pro domini quam pro se ipso in hoc parte sequitur! The biggest class action suit in the universe! Or better yet, libel! We'll show 'em good!"

And then he sat down on the sidewalk and had a good laugh because his life was just so...silly.

Chapter 25

AS IN CHARMED

Buzzz!

"AusCorp Vehicle Storage Division, Ralph speaking.

"Oh, Mr. Auslander! We heard about the Lompac explosion--

"No injuries? Oh, that's good.

"You did? He is? A new record? I'm glad to hear that, sir.

"Sir? You have an idea about your insurance claim?

"--Pardon? I don't think I heard you quite right, sir.

"Do I know any good lawyer-theologians?"

The End

Some Background on the Quantum Interface Device

by Berkeley Sartre, Ph.D.

On the morning of 9th May 1998 I was sitting in the shower in my small apartment in Southern California when I suddenly noticed there was something terribly wrong with the universe. There was also something terribly wrong with my shower, but that's not important right now.

The name of the something that is terribly wrong with the universe is "causality". Most people like having effects follow their causes, as when making scrambled eggs: most people do not like having a scrambled egg unscramble itself and leap back into its shell. Thanks to causality as a universal principle this never happens; however, the price you pay for this convenience is your soul. I would prefer getting at least a Ferrari in return.

From the perspective of causality, each physical state of your brain follows logically and inevitably from the state preceding it through the operation of the laws of physics. This is a minor pain in the neck as it eliminates free will and, consequently, all concepts that involve it — for example, "achievement".

By reducing all mental activity to a physical basis, we establish the workings of the mind as essentially equivalent to an organized rockslide. Just as the atoms making up a bunch of rocks fall down the mountainside under the control of the forces of nature — gravity, electromagnetism and so forth — so do the atoms of our brains.

If a rain of gravel down Mt. Rainer spells out some fragment of, say, the script to "Cocoanuts" when it hits the ground, do we give that rockslide credit? We do not. Yet when the collective atoms of George S. Kaufman do essentially the same thing, we call him a comic genius and his estate sues the rockslide for plagiarism. Why is this?

Such was my train of thought that morning in the shower as the tiles rained down on my head.

Since I very much wanted a Nobel Prize in Physics (as an underpaid science teacher at Sacramento Community College I could use the prestige), and more than that wanted to be able to take credit for it, I decided to try to think of a way to prove free will, create a device to demonstrate its existence, win the Nobel Prize, and if at all possible make lots of money.

I reasoned this way:

In the real world, according to modern physics, nothing exists in a definite state until it is observed: a particle has no definite position until someone "sees" it. You will note that the observer/seer itself cannot have a physical existence; if it did, it would be a quantum-indefinite system itself, thereby leading to recursion and an infinite loop. So therefore an observer must be a nonphysical entity that has physical effects — i.e. the elimination of uncertainty for a moment, as in the establishment of the location of a particle-- manifested through its observations.

We know that the act of observation causes a system to become definite; e.g., we know that our fingers are attached to our hands, and not distributed as probability waves throughout the universe. In other words, the observer makes the indefinite definite. Take the lightswitch on your wall, for instance. When unobserved, it technically exists in a superposition state of ON and OFF and only becomes ON or OFF when it is observed.

Now shrink the switch down, down, down to a single quantum event: the firing of a neuron in the brain. In order to allow for free will, the nonphysical agent must act on a physical system in such a way to cause it to depart from the otherwise certain chain of events; that is, to supplant causality with teleology.

There is only one step from CAUSING a definite state, as the observer is known to do, to CHOOSING a definite state. My premise for free will was that the observer can "teleogize" the the light-switch to exist in a desired state, ON or OFF.

How to prove this? Experimentation. I must admit at this point that I cruelly ran the Schroedinger's Cat experiment on Tumble, my landlady's cat. Be assured that I did explain, quite thoroughly, to the cat exactly what I was going to do and gave it time to demur.

The experiment runs like this: put a cat in a sealed container along with a bottle of poison gas. Rig the bottle with a control mechanism so that it will release the gas if and only if a single quantum event takes place: specifically, the decay of a particular radioactive atom. If the atom has a half-life of one hour, then after one hour there is a 50% probability that it decayed, set off the mechanism and killed the cat. There is also a 50% probability that it didn't. You can't find out unless you look — and technically, until you do look the cat is in a superposition state of dead AND alive.

What most people don't realize is, you aren't the primary observer of the cat. The cat is.

So I ran the experiment a few hundred times, and behold! the cat was never killed! This was lucky, for my landlady would have killed ME otherwise.

The cat, I decided, was selecting the outcome of the test by teleologically controlling the decay of the particle in order not to be killed. This effectively confirmed my theory of free will.

In human practice, the observer — the soul, if you like — "teleogizes" quantum systems in the brain to exist in certain ways in order to initiate an action. Elaborate support systems — nerves, muscles, et cetera — operating causally handle most of the actual work.

Some may wonder: given this capacity, can the human observer work outside the brain, causing other systems to obey its will? In other words, is there such a thing as psychokinesis?

I attempted to induce such an effect. After much work with exotic South American hallucinogens, I decided to stop fooling around and pursue my PK research. After much investigation I gave up on human-based PK; human observers, it seems, do not know how to work without the familiar "keyboard" of the brain's circuitry.

Given the known length of time it takes us to figure out our own heads, I am amazed that I even bothered with this investigation. (In this area I wish to thank James Randi and Sir John Eccles for their invaluable assistance, as well as Garry Auslander for funding my lawsuits against Uri Geller.)

Eventually, however, I discovered a nonhuman method to control large-scale quantum systems, and constructed what I called the SQUID: the Sartre QUantum Interface Device. The rest, thanks to Garry Auslander, is history.

Sadly, according to my lawyer I cannot reveal the SQUID's workings to you. I can only suggest that you read a lot of Zen texts. This will not help, but it will not hurt either.

Berkeley Sartre

San Diego, California

7th June 2011

-- from the AusCorp Popradio Model III Owner's Manual, courtesy Auslander Communications Nostalgia Dept.