Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker Page A

she stood up straight.
    I got up, determined to show Kreementz who was boss. “Mister Kreementz, the null-ray was designed to compress the matter inside your stack. We did not say that the matter would then disappear. I believe I warned you to keep the stack clean.”
    “But I didn’t see anything building up!” Kreementz burst out. “The first month I cleaned it out every day, but one day I missed and the gunk was gone anyway. I figured that ray of yours would make anything disappear if it stayed in long enough.”
    “In other words, you haven’t cleaned the stack for almost five years of continuous operation?”
    Kreementz started to nod, then glared. He’d admitted too much already.
    “I guess you were right,” Harry said to me as he stood up.
    “About the automatic shut-off?”
    “You mean you designed the null-ray to stop working?” Kreementz demanded.
    There was a sudden crunching. The little ball was drilling through our wall and into the next room. When the noise died down again I answered.
    “We wanted it to be…foolproof.”
    “You see,” Harry added, “If you leave something under the null-ray long enough…say five years…then it goes black hole.”
    Kreementz mopped his brow. “What would have happened if we’d gotten a black hole in Stack Seven?”
    “I’ll give you the good news first,” Harry said, his ropey lips twisting into a smile. “Quantum effects would force the hole to evaporate into pure energy. By measuring the energy released in the evaporation event, scientists would be able to tell whether or not the quark theory of matter is correct. Fletch, give him the bad news.”
    “According to Stephen Hawking’s calculations, the ‘evaporation’ of a hundred kilogram black hole would be the same as a ten megaton nuclear blast. Of course, if the quark theory of matter is wrong, then the blast would be some ten thousand times stronger.”
    “You guys would have been great on Laugh-In ,” Kreementz said sourly.
    “What’s Laugh-In ?” Rosie asked.
    “It was a TV show when Mister Kreementz was little,” I said. “He seems like a person who watched television a lot as a child, doesn’t he?”
    “At least I had a childhood,” Kreementz retorted. “You guys look like you was hatched. Especially him!”
    Harry was staring at the wall, shoulders hunched and fists thrust into the enormous pockets of his baggy grey polyester pants. There was a muffled crash as the little ball left the next room.
    Harry turned slowly. “How many tons?”
    “He means how many tons are in the stack,” I explained.
    “I ain’t weighed it,” Kreementz said sullenly. “Five years worth of smoke. Maybe two hundred thousand tons.”
    “But smoke is light,” Rosie protested.
    “Not at Murden Chemical,” I said.
    “Not when these guys are through with it,” Kreementz added. “They built us a ray which kills all the atoms inside Stack Seven. They stop vibrating and shrivel up. We have a cap on the stack. Every few minutes it gets as full of smoke as it can hold, and then the null-ray triggers, and everything inside the smokestack disappears.”
    “You keep forgetting that the stuff doesn’t disappear,” I corrected. “It just collapses down to a very small size.”
    “Like a trash compactor,” Rosie suggested.
    I nodded. “That’s what we had in mind. One smokestack full of crud was supposed to make a hundred-kilogram block the size of a brick. But Mister Kreementz left the stuff in there to get collapsed a little more with each pulse of the null-ray. We warned him not to do that, but he did it anyway. If I hadn’t put in a mass detector coupled to a shut-off circuit, then Mister Kreementz would have turned Central Jersey into just another beautiful memory.”
    The rumbling had stopped after the last crash. The shiny little speck of degenerate matter had probably sunk into our flower bed. “How dense is that stuff?” I asked Harry.
    He had been scribbling on the blackboard ever