Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker

parted in wonder. A bubble landed on the film and merged back in.
    Someone was shouting in the reception room. Someone from New Jersey. Rosie’s footsteps came stitching down the hall. I walked past Harry and leaned out the door. “What’s up?”
    Rosie wore her hair over her face with a transparent peep-hole dyed in. Her dress was hologrammed to look like a tree-trunk. A nice girl. Sometimes I wondered what she looked like.
    “There’s a man with a wheelbarrow to see you, Mister Fletcher. A Mister Kreementz?”
    I remembered Kreementz. He was in charge of pollution control at Murden Chemical in Newark. Harry and I had built him a novel stack-scrubber about five years ago. There’d been no complaints before this.
    “What’s in the wheelbarrow?”
    Rosie glanced sidelong at Harry and tittered. “That’s the funny part. The wheelbarrow’s empty. And he keeps saying he wants to dump it out on your …”
    The door from the reception room slammed open and Kreementz came surging down the hall with a big steel wheelbarrow in front of him. If it hadn’t been for the necktie, he would have looked like an angry old construction worker. Rosie and I stepped back into my office, bumping Harry.
    “Garden State Degeneracy—We Deliver,” Harry said cryptically.
    And then the wrath of Kreementz was upon us. “The jig is up, boys. I filed suit on my way over. You know what a plant shutdown costs per hour ? You ain’t gonna sneak off and leave me holding the bag.”
    He set the wheelbarrow down heavily. His suit was sweat-stained, and he was breathing hard. I wondered how an empty wheelbarrow could be so heavy.
    “Sit down, Mr. Kreementz.” I gestured at my chair. “I don’t know why you think Fletcher & Company would do anything other than stand behind our products. If Murden Chemical has a problem with our emission controller, I can assure you that …”
    Harry sniffed the air and winked at Rosie. He stuck his thumb out from his fist and mimed someone drinking out of a bottle. I was surprised to see him joke that way. Kreementz caught the gesture and flared up.
    “That weirdo null-ray of yours is on the fritz. Every time we start it, it shuts itself off again. And they’re blaming me!” He glared at Harry. “You’d drink, too! You think it’s funny? Try this on for size!”
    With a grunt he tipped the wheelbarrow forward. Something too small to see thudded on to the concrete floor. Dust and stone chips flew up. There was a terrible rumbling, like a lead beer-barrel. It was rolling towards Harry.
    With a heavy man’s nimbleness, Harry stepped to the side and knelt down. There was a slowly lengthening groove in the floor. There was something at the end of the groove, something tiny that rolled and rumbled.
    Rosie was standing by the door looking like a hairy fence-post. When her peephole didn’t show, you couldn’t tell which way she was facing. I assumed she was watching Harry. He seemed to fascinate her.
    “Very nice,” Harry said as he inched along the floor on his hands and knees. “Come take a look, Fletch.”
    I glanced inquiringly at Kreementz. “Be my guest,” he said. “We’ve got plenty more where that came from. The base of Stack Seven. That’s the one that you …”
    Suddenly I got the picture.
    The rumbling was still going on. It sounded for all the world like Kreementz had started a heavy little ball rolling across our floor. I got down next to Harry and squinted.
    It was tiny, a fraction of a millimeter across. A little sphere, shiny like a droplet of mercury. Judging from the groove it was chewing into the floor, I guessed it weighed well over a hundred kilograms. Harry planted his thick thumb in the ball’s path. The ball rumbled under his thumb without slowing down. Pretty soon it would hit the wall.
    Rosie was behind me, leaning over to see too. I shot a look up. With her hair hanging forward, I could see her face. She had a prim mouth and faraway eyes. When she saw me looking at her