Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker

breathing heavily. He had had several glasses of kirsch before lunch. This quarrel had been brewing for three months. I thought his experiment interesting, but I saw no reason to take Feynman’s theory so literally as to assert that we had produced time-travel. Ion could see this in my eyes.
    He stood up suddenly, almost as if to attack me. Was he, on top of it all, jealous of my attentions to Klara? New Year’s Eve, after he had passed out, Klara and I, how close we had come! I tried to keep this out of my eyes. I stood up clumsily, and my chair fell to the floor behind me.
    “Don’t panic, William,” Ion said, shrugging on his suede jacket. “I only thought we could give Klara a demonstration.”
    The twins, attracted by the noise of my chair, had come running in from the study, and insisted that they too be allowed to come see Daddy’s machine. Ion acquiesced, on the condition that they bring a certain toy.
    We all bundled into our coats…Klara wore a charming fox coat sewed in herring-bone strips…and we walked the three blocks to the Physics Institute.
    The twins ran ahead of us, screaming and trying to slide on the frozen puddles. Klara walked between Ion and me, linking an arm with each of us. The sky was low and grey. The eternal mist seemed to form a circular wall around us, always ten meters off.
    “Should we show Klara the bullet series?” I asked Ion, speaking across Klara’s lovely, upturned face.
    Ion pursed his lips and shook his head. “Too fast. Klara has to see it to believe it.”
    “Believe what?”
    “We have a sort of tunnel,” I explained. “The size of a toy train tunnel. And if we shoot a bullet through it, the bullet seems to come out the right end before it goes in the left.”
    Klara laughed. “Now that sounds useful. We could use one of your machines in the tunnel under the castle…where those dreadful traffic jams are.”
    “Actually,” Ion said, “I thought I would use a little car today—the little three-wheeler that I helped the twins make last night.”
    The twins had brought the little car, a bright red-yellow-blue mass of Lego blocks. On the top was a battery-run motor, with a cog wheel linked by a black plastic chain to a gear on the single front wheel.
    Klara examined our “time-tunnel” with interest. The core of it was the shoe-box-sized vacuum chamber made of phase-mirrors. You could see in quite easily. The thick loops of the guiding-field wires arched over the box like croquet wickets.
    I removed the rifle from its mount on one end of the lab-table, and waited while Ion got the car from the little girls.
    Then, bustling a bit, he lined up his three women in chairs against the wall, and set the car down at one end of the table. I cleared my throat, preparatory to telling them what they might expect, but Ion shushed me.
    “First let them see, and then we’ll discuss it.”
    I taped an iron nail to the bottom of the Lego car, and dialed the guiding-field’s power up to some hundred times the level we had used before. The Lego car made a pretty big test-particle.
    In all frankness, I expected the experiment to be a failure. The car would roll up to the phase-mirror box, bump into the side and stop…nothing more. But I was wrong.
    As the little car labored across the table towards the left end of the box, something happened at the right end. Seemingly out of no place, an identical Lego car pushed out of the right end of the tunnel and went chuffing on its way! “And there’s one inside now, rolling left!” Klara exclaimed, leaning forward. She was right. For a few seconds there were three Lego cars on the table.
    Car (1): The original car, still approaching the tunnel’s left entrance. Car (2): The one moving in the tunnel, from right to left. Car (3): The new one moving away from the right end of the tunnel.
    And then car (1) and car (2) met at the left-end mirror. They melted into each other…nose into nose, wheel into wheel, tail into tail. It was like