Free Transreal Cyberpunk by Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling Page A

parameters. Not to mention Comrade Khrushchev’s speech!”
    Vlad sniffed the air. “Comrade General. Have you fueled this craft with liquid paraffin?”
    “Naturally!”
    Vlad’s voice sank. “These people are working on a rocket which misfired. And you haven’t drained the fuel?”
    Nedelin drew himself up stiffly. “That would take hours! I understand the risk! I’m not asking these people to face any danger I wouldn’t face myself!”
    “You pompous ass!” Vlad screeched. “That’s no Earthling rocket! It only looks like one because you expect it to! It’s not supposed to have fuel!”
    Nedelin stared in amazement. “What?”
    “That’s why it didn’t take off!” Vlad raved. “It didn’t want to kill us all! That drive is from outer space! You’ve turned it into a gigantic firebomb!”
    “You’ve gone mad! Comrade, get hold of yourself!” Nedelin shouted. We were all on the edge of panic.
    “This blockhead’s useless,” Vlad snarled, grabbing my arm. “We’ve got to get those people out of there, Nikita! It could take off any second—everyone expected it to!”
    We ran for the rocket, shouting wildly, yelling anything that came into our heads. We had to get the technicians away. The Tunguska device had never known its own strength—it didn’t know how frail we were. I stumbled and looked over my shoulder. Nedelin’s flunkies were just a dozen steps behind us.
    The ground crew saw us coming. They cried out in alarm. Panic spread like lightning.
    It wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t all been Russians. A gloomy and sensitive people are always ready to believe the worst. And the worst in this case was obvious: total disaster from a late ignition.
    They fled like maniacs, but they couldn’t escape their expectations. Pale streamers of flame gushed from the engines. More streamers arched from the rocket’s peak, the spikes of auroral fire. The gantries shattered like matchsticks, filling the air above us with wheeling black shrapnel. Vlad stumbled to the ground. Somewhere ahead of us I could hear barking.
    I hauled Vlad to his feet. “Follow the dog!” I bellowed over the roar. “Into the focus of the ellipse, where it’s stable!”
    Vlad stumbled after me, jabbering with rage. “If only the Americans had gotten the drive! They would have put men on the moon!”
    We dashed through a blinding rain of paraffin. The barking grew louder, and now I could see the eager dog of blue light, showing us the way. The rocket was dissolving above us. The blast-seared concrete under our feet pitched and buckled like aspic. Before us the rocket’s great nozzles dissolved into flaming webs of spectral whiteness.
    Behind us, around us, the paraffin caught in a great flaming sea of deadly heat. I felt my flesh searing in the last instant: the instant when the inferno’s shock wave caught us up like straws and flung us into the core of white light.
    §
    I saw nothing but white for the longest time, seeing nothing, touching nothing. I floated in the timeless void. All the panic, the terror of the event, evaporated from me. All thoughts stopped. It was like death. Maybe it was a kind of death, I still don’t know.
    And then, somehow, that perfect silence and oneness broke into pieces again. It shattered into millions of grainy atoms, a soundless crawling blizzard. Like phantom, hissing snow.
    I stared into the snow, seeing it swirling, resolving into something new, with perfect ease, as if it were following the phase of my own dreams ... A beautiful sheen, a white blur—
    §
    The white blur of reflections on glass. I was standing in front of a glass window. A department-store window. There were televisions behind the glass, the biggest televisions I had ever seen.
    Vlad was standing next to me. A woman was holding my arm, a pretty beatnik girl with a flowered silk blouse and a scandalous short skirt. She was staring raptly at the television. A crowd of well-dressed people filled the pavement around