Master of Space and Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Y’all kin still owe me that five hunnert. And tell you whut. Ah’ll truck yore goods home free.”
    â€œGive him the money, Fletch. Bring it to 501 Suydam, McCormack. Gerber Cybernetics. There’s an alley in back.”

5
Godzilla Meets the Toad Man
    â€œL ETS take the Jersey Turnpike home,” suggested Harry. “It’s faster.”
    â€œOkay. And give me another beer.” I was feeling happy again. “This blunzer is really going to work. I mean, here you’ve already traveled back in time and created eight thousand dollars. It’s fantastic.”
    â€œOne thing about time travel,” said Harry musingly. “There probably has to be a counterweight. Action equals reaction, you know.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI mean that if I travel from the future to the past, then something has to travel from the past to the future. To balance things out. When I jump back to Friday afternoon, I’ll probably have to jump some organism forward a few days.”
    â€œIf you jump an animal forward, it’ll seem real big,” I reminded Harry.
    â€œThat’s right. Every object in the universe is shrinking, so if something jumps forward a few days it seems enormous. Did you ever see any Godzilla movies, Fletch? With the giant lizard?”
    I shot a look over at Harry. His expression was bland and unreadable. I started to say something, then let it drop. He was just trying to get a rise out of me.
    The Jersey Turnpike’s pavement was in good repair today. A Porsche passed us, doing what looked like 120 miles per hour. Its tires threw up a long, blinding shock-cone of rainwater. I stuck to the slow lane and kept my eyes open. To the right were the refineries, to the left were docks and railyards.
    Harry powered down his window and inhaled deeply. “Ah! This is the smell of American richness.”
    Many years ago Fletcher & Company had done some business designing stack scrubbers for one of these companies. But now times were so hard that nobody much cared about pollution. The main thing was just to keep the factories open. As long as they stank, you knew they weren’t idle.
    Although I couldn’t share Harry’s pleasure at the unearthly smells, this stretch of the Jersey Turnpike was one of my favorite places. I was particularly fond of the refinery cracking towers, those great abstract totems of knotted pipe and wire. And the big storage tanks, the code-painted conduits, the webs of scaffolding, the catwalks, the great pulsing gas flares—all sheerly functional, yet charged with surreal meaning. I felt like a cockroach in a pharmacy.
    â€œWhat is that over there?” said Harry, interrupting my reverie. “Do you hear that noise?”
    There was a deep, spasmodic roaring coming from the direction of the docks. The sound grew louder, and now you could hear sirens as well, sirens and gunshots. I slowed down a bit, and Harry and I peered off to the left. There was something big there, an immense shadowy form, a giant lizard stomping a warehouse . Crashes and roars. A boxcar went flying. A high-tension electrical tower crumpled and great sparks flew.
    I stepped on the gas, but Harry reached over and took the key out of the ignition.
    â€œStop!” he commanded. “I want to enjoy this!”
    I had no choice but to pull off into the emergency lane. Some other rubberneckers had already done the same. Just a few hundred meters off was a huge predatory lizard, a two-hundred-foot Godzilla with a head like a man-eating garbage scow. One of the refinery’s gas flares pulsed up just then, and the monster threw back his head to roar defiance.
    GWEEEEEEEEEENT! AH-ROOOOOOOOO-OOOOOONKH!
    A police car pulled up on the side of the turnpike and one of the cops opened up on the monster with a heavy machine gun.
    Budda-ba-budda-burrtttt!
    RRRAAAAAAANH! RRWAAAAAAAAAEEE-EEEEEE!
    Budda-burrtttt-brrt!
    RRRRWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
    The ground