ODD JOB
Thought I'd post one of my early published stories, a 1,000-word tale from back when I was foolish enough to assume that shorter stories took less time to write. This one's about a day in the life of a very unusual consultant.
Odd Job
by Ray Tabler
I happened to be tidying up an assignment in Duluth when I got one of those calls. The people on the other end of the line arranged a backseat ride in an Air National Guard fighter jet that got me down to Texas in an hour. A helicopter flew me to a nondescript group of buildings in the middle of a lot of flat, dry land somewhere north of El Paso.
Some guy in a lab coat met me at the front door.
"I'm Dr. Hardesty, the project director. Are you Mr. Black?" His handshake felt tight, nervous.
"Yeah, you can call me Vic."
Hardesty glanced back at the helicopter spinning down outside. "Where's the rest of your team?"
"I'm it."
"Washington assured me that a team of experts was on its way."
"The experts are still putting their boots on. I'm the gap filler, because you said you needed someone right away."
"This is a very unusual situation."
"Doc, all of my situations are unusual."
Hardesty pursed his lips, glanced at the helicopter again and started to fill me in. He talked as we went farther into the facility and deeper underground. Before long, we stood in front of a twenty-foot-wide plate glass window that looked into the biggest vacuum chamber I'd ever seen. And I've seen a few.
"Okay Doc, I didn't catch all of the technical details, but basically you've got some kind of matter transfer set up here. Is that about it?" I jerked a thumb at two shimmering rectangles floating side by side about a foot off the floor in the middle of the vacuum chamber. "Cool. What's the problem?"
"The matrix is unstable and shrinking at a rate of 1.26 centimeters per minute. The power to maintain the interfaces is increasing rapidly. We're already causing brownouts in Las Cruces. El Paso will be affected in an hour. We've got a ninety minute window before we have to cut the power, if the matrix doesn't collapse before then."
"I still don't see how I fit in, Doc."
Hardesty pointed out a couple of wheeled robots parked a few yards from the shimmering rectangles. "Apparently, there's some kind of effect as the interfaces are approached. The probes go dead."
"Oh, now I understand. You need some fool to go in there and poke his head through that thing."
Twenty minutes later I was cycling through the airlock, wearing a mark-seven pressure suit. The mark-four fits me better, but sevens were all they had.
I was carrying a broom handle with a clear, plastic air-tight box duct-taped to one end. Inside the box was a white lab rat I'd decided to call Henry.
As Henry and I crossed the floor of the big vacuum chamber my head started to feel fuzzy. By the time we passed the stalled-out robots I had a heck of a headache. A full-blown migraine was raging in my brain as I stopped a foot in front of the left-hand rectangle. I had to concentrate to keep from tripping over my feet.
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Hardesty and his team were visible through the control room window, punching buttons and monitoring instruments. He signaled me to proceed. I gave him a thumbs-up and turned back to the rectangle.
I picked up the pole and slowly eased Henry into the left-hand rectangle. Henry and the pole slowly popped out of the right-hand rectangle. I waved the pole back and forth. Henry wagged in time to my actions.
Hardesty looked puzzled on his side of the glass, not the reaction I expected at that point.
I pulled Henry back out. The little guy seemed none the worse for his trip.
Next I put Henry aside and shuffled up close to the face of the rectangle. Bending at the waist, I leaned forward.
There wasn't any additional pain as my head went through. My upper body hung out of one of the rectangles. I glanced over to see my pressure-suited backside sticking out of the other rectangle a few feet away, swaying a bit. It was an awkward position.
This was all very strange, and it took me a moment or two to notice something equally strange. There was some sign on the wall of the chamber. The letters were backwards. A look around confirmed that all of the lettering in sight was backwards. In fact, I was quite sure that the airlock had been on the left side of the control room window when I'd entered the chamber, not the right.
About this time some movement caught my eye. Hardesty and everybody in the control room were frantically waving the abort signal. That was more than enough for me. I straightened up, pulling my upper body out of the rectangle. The interfaces shrank to dots and disappeared. My headache disappeared with them, and I assume the residents of Las Cruces got to turn their air conditioners back on.
Before I had my pressure suit more than halfway off, Hardesty hustled me into a conference room full of people.
"Mr. Black, we got some very surprising readings, so astonishing that we didn't understand the implications immediately." Hardesty paused and drew a ragged breath. "Anything passing through the interface became antimatter."
They all started arguing about how big a boom there would have been if I'd dropped Henry. I started laughing.
"Excuse me, Mr. Black. I fail to see the humor in this situation."
I had to stifle another guffaw. "You see Doc. It's just that when I was in there I came this close to reaching over and smacking my own antimatter backside."
Hardesty fainted.
They were still trying to bring him around when I left.
END
Odd Job published in: Cup of Joe, Coffee House Flash Fiction, Wicked East Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-61706-119-6.
And, yes. Some of you might realize that I Tuckerized an old coworker, Vic Black. With his permission.
Tuckerization (or tuckerism[1]) is the act of using a person's name in an original story as an in-joke. The term is derived from Wilson Tucker, a pioneering American science fiction writer, fan and fanzine editor, who made a practice of using his friends' names for minor characters in his stories. For example, Tucker named a character after Lee Hoffman in his novel The Long Loud Silence, and after Walt Willis in Wild Talent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckerization