Free Spacetime Donuts by Rudy Rucker Page B

rock you started with . And you can go around again without ever encountering any solid matter—just form and structure."
    "Ja, ja, very nice," Kurtowski smiled. "And you want to make the trip around the Circular Scale with my Virtual Field Generator, eh Vernor?"
    Vernor gulped. "Actually, I was thinking more in terms of sending a piece of apparatus around. Like maybe a camera."
    "If I can risk my beautiful machine, you can risk your neck, Mr. Maxwell, After all, Mick has determined that the field is not harmful. It should be relatively safe for you to make this trip." Kurtowski paused a moment. "But there are difficulties. There will be some serious difficulties."
    Mick Turner, back from the galactic center, had been listening to the last part of their conversation. He grinned and slapped Vernor on the back. "The incredible shrinking man," he said.
     

Chapter 9: ZZ-74
    "Did you ever plug in with a girl, Mick?" Vernor asked Turner. They were dragging a heavy crate of synthequartz across Professor Kurtowski's laboratory floor. They had been living there for two weeks, helping to beef up and outfit the VFG for a trip through the place where zero equals infinity. Vernor couldn't decide if he wanted the machine to be ready for him or not. He liked this in-between time; for now he'd abandoned his dreams of Alice and had put normal life on hold.
    "Sure," Turner drawled, "plenty of times. You get a piece of co-ax and run it from your socket to her socket and then you do it."
    "Yeah, yeah," Vernor interrupted, "I know. But what's it feel like?"
    "You never done that?" Turner asked in amazement.
    "No, well, you know. I just never did. And now I may never get a chance."
    Mick laughed and shook his head. "If you get into it it's kind of hard to get sorted out after you come. One time I wanted to say something afterwards and it came out of her mouth. The words." He grunted with effort as they rocked the box over a thick cable in its path. "Once I met a chick who had a dual amplifier. You both plugged into the amp and it mixed the signals and sent 'em back triple intensity. Actually there was four of us plugged into the amp. It had these long coil-spring co-axes. You get so merged—it's a drag coming down. Just being in one body again."
    Kurtowski looked up as they approached him. "Tomorrow is the day, boys." Indeed the machine looked ready. They had constructed a tensegrity sphere of molybdenum tubing and nyxon cables. The two VFG cones had been rebuilt and attached to the inside of the sphere at its North and South poles, with the cone points almost touching at the sphere's center. There was a band of power units along the equator of the sphere, with a space left for a seat and a control panel. All that remained was to encase the sphere in a film of the strong, transparent synthequartz and it would be a functioning scale-ship.
    The idea was that the virtual field would fill the sphere, causing the whole thing to shrink—sphere, VFG cones, passenger and all. The passenger, Vernor in this case, would be able to control the rate and the direction of the size change.
    They set to work putting the coating of synthequartz on the framework of molybdenum and nyxon. The sphere was constructed to have a certain natural elasticity so that it would not crack under possible irregular pressures. The purpose of sealing Vernor off from the space around him was so that he could continue to breath when the sphere and its contents had shrunk to a size smaller than an oxygen molecule. Without the containing skin of synthequartz, the air which shrank along with Vernor might drift out of the field and expand to a non-usable size—after all, you can't breathe basketballs.
    The Professor was in a talkative mood. "I'm very proud of you Vernor," he said. "This is the kind of thing I wanted to use my VFG for—not miniaturizing factories or shrinking doctors to clean out rich Users' arteries. Daring scientific research by a fellow initiate, this is worthy of