Read Online The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) by Stan Hayes - Free Book Online
Authors: Stan Hayes
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even though I never felt like I ought to try to touch you.”
“Spoken like the bright boy you are, but let me get into this ‘realness’ a little deeper with you. Remember how, in a couple of those Republic movie serials that you loved so much, the villain would sometimes sit in a special chair and be changed into someone else? Or how someone would get into a ‘chamber’ and be transported from one place to another?”
“Sure. Remember in The Black Widow, when the head bad guy demands to see Hitomu for himself, because he’d always been zapped into the daughter’s lair and was seen only by her. He said, ‘You’re asking us to believe in a Supreme Leader who’s brought here from the other side of the world by some super-scientific Rube Goldberg device?’ Then Hitomu materializes, and the henchman doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Finally, when he tries to shake hands and says ‘How you do, Mr. Hitomu? My name’s –whatever it was-.’ And Hitomu stiffs him; he says something like ‘I am already aware of your existence,’ and the bad guy’s seriously pissed off; I’ll never forget how the look on his face went from ‘may I please kiss your ass?’ to ‘if only I had the upper hand...’”
Nick grinned. “Tony Warde. He was Killer Kane in Buck Rogers, too; his big moment. Well, you’ll be seeing more of that; today’s movies and television’ll be able to make it seem a lot more real than those old shows did. What I’m getting at is that, by the time I came along, doing it- for real- had gotten to be sort of old hat.”
“You don’t say,” Jack said in what he intended to be an ironic tone.
“Yea, verily, I do say.”
“So when was all this, anyway?”
“Early fifth millennium, in current terminology.”
They rode their stationary motorcycles in silence, thought-fragments roaring around the motordrome of Jack’s mind like the open-ported Indians in the carny board-barrel “motordromes” of Hamm County fairs long past. “Guess flying saucers were like model T’s by then.”
“More like oxcarts,” Nick said, “but I’m glad to see that you get the idea. There’re thousands of years between us, chronologically; as much time as there is between you and, say, Imhotep. Think about what you’d have to say to him about airplanes, submarines and television, and multiply that by a factor of hell, I don’t know, twenty-five or thirty. That’s what you’re about to hear from me.”
“Except that I can’t get back there to tell him.”
“Nope. But I could take a message.”
“Ha, ha. So since you’re here, I take it that humanity didn’t take the opportunity, with the A-bomb, to blow itself off the face of the earth.”
Nick grinned. “Or fuck itself off, either, although it came close to doing both. We’ll get into that, but pardon me while I leap ahead. As you might imagine, having survived our own foolishness, we got serious and made quite a lot of progress. Sort of pushed on beyond relativity, you might say. You’ll see a tantalizing hint or two, in your lifetime, of the path we took, but that’s all they’ll be; hints. Physics at the sub-atomic level, et cetera. Sometime when we have an hour or two, ask me about quantum entanglement, which was what let me get into the ‘condition’ I’m in. Anyway, the result of all that is Nick Charles, hanging out with you in this whacked-out little museum.”
“Excuse me if I leap ahead a little,” Jack said. “Not that I haven’t enjoyed it… hell, that’s an understatement… but why? Of everybody who’s ever lived, Sir Francis Drake, Julius Caesar; how is it that you decided to spend all this time with me?”
“Since I know that you’ll be busy teaching La Skipper how to ride this morning, which I don’t necessarily recommend, I’ll give you the short answer, subject to later expansion, if you don’t mind.”
“And what would that be?”
“Entertainment. Talk to you later.” With that, Nick, still
“Spoken like the bright boy you are, but let me get into this ‘realness’ a little deeper with you. Remember how, in a couple of those Republic movie serials that you loved so much, the villain would sometimes sit in a special chair and be changed into someone else? Or how someone would get into a ‘chamber’ and be transported from one place to another?”
“Sure. Remember in The Black Widow, when the head bad guy demands to see Hitomu for himself, because he’d always been zapped into the daughter’s lair and was seen only by her. He said, ‘You’re asking us to believe in a Supreme Leader who’s brought here from the other side of the world by some super-scientific Rube Goldberg device?’ Then Hitomu materializes, and the henchman doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Finally, when he tries to shake hands and says ‘How you do, Mr. Hitomu? My name’s –whatever it was-.’ And Hitomu stiffs him; he says something like ‘I am already aware of your existence,’ and the bad guy’s seriously pissed off; I’ll never forget how the look on his face went from ‘may I please kiss your ass?’ to ‘if only I had the upper hand...’”
Nick grinned. “Tony Warde. He was Killer Kane in Buck Rogers, too; his big moment. Well, you’ll be seeing more of that; today’s movies and television’ll be able to make it seem a lot more real than those old shows did. What I’m getting at is that, by the time I came along, doing it- for real- had gotten to be sort of old hat.”
“You don’t say,” Jack said in what he intended to be an ironic tone.
“Yea, verily, I do say.”
“So when was all this, anyway?”
“Early fifth millennium, in current terminology.”
They rode their stationary motorcycles in silence, thought-fragments roaring around the motordrome of Jack’s mind like the open-ported Indians in the carny board-barrel “motordromes” of Hamm County fairs long past. “Guess flying saucers were like model T’s by then.”
“More like oxcarts,” Nick said, “but I’m glad to see that you get the idea. There’re thousands of years between us, chronologically; as much time as there is between you and, say, Imhotep. Think about what you’d have to say to him about airplanes, submarines and television, and multiply that by a factor of hell, I don’t know, twenty-five or thirty. That’s what you’re about to hear from me.”
“Except that I can’t get back there to tell him.”
“Nope. But I could take a message.”
“Ha, ha. So since you’re here, I take it that humanity didn’t take the opportunity, with the A-bomb, to blow itself off the face of the earth.”
Nick grinned. “Or fuck itself off, either, although it came close to doing both. We’ll get into that, but pardon me while I leap ahead. As you might imagine, having survived our own foolishness, we got serious and made quite a lot of progress. Sort of pushed on beyond relativity, you might say. You’ll see a tantalizing hint or two, in your lifetime, of the path we took, but that’s all they’ll be; hints. Physics at the sub-atomic level, et cetera. Sometime when we have an hour or two, ask me about quantum entanglement, which was what let me get into the ‘condition’ I’m in. Anyway, the result of all that is Nick Charles, hanging out with you in this whacked-out little museum.”
“Excuse me if I leap ahead a little,” Jack said. “Not that I haven’t enjoyed it… hell, that’s an understatement… but why? Of everybody who’s ever lived, Sir Francis Drake, Julius Caesar; how is it that you decided to spend all this time with me?”
“Since I know that you’ll be busy teaching La Skipper how to ride this morning, which I don’t necessarily recommend, I’ll give you the short answer, subject to later expansion, if you don’t mind.”
“And what would that be?”
“Entertainment. Talk to you later.” With that, Nick, still
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