Master of Space and Time by Rudy Rucker

a restless eye on things. Harry, in front, lolled drunkenly in his seat, pawing at Sondra’s exposed thighs and protesting in slurred tones each time she slapped his hand away. Our Cadillac lurched through the traffic, narrowly missing several collisions.
    â€œHe’s juiced,” Tad said to me, jerking his head toward Harry’s slumping shoulders. Tad kept one hand on his hat, holding it tight against the slipstream of air that whistled through the car’s two broken windshields. “That’s the cool way to be around the palace. The slugs can’t handle juice. You, Joe, you’re nowhere. You’ll end up dead or a Herberite, I’ll tell you now.”
    Tad’s words sent a chill through my veins. With Harry so drunk, what chance did we stand against those guards? If I died here, would I really be dead? This was really just a kind of dream, wasn’t it? Yet what if you have a dream so bad that you die of a heart attack during the dream? Perhaps every time someone dies in his sleep of a heart attack, the attack is in fact coupled with a dream of overwhelming power in which the person experiences death in great detail. Who can tell?
    The palace guards were only some fifty meters ahead of us now. They could see there was something fishy about us. As we drew closer, they raised their weapons and aimed.
    â€œAll right,” said Harry in his normal voice. He’d willed himself sober, just like that. He sat up straight and stepped on the gas. “Beam them, Fletch. You can shoot over my shoulder.”
    I dialed my disintegrator ray to maximum fan and blasted away. I was already a murderer fromsmashing that supermarket manager’s spine-rider. Kill one, kill twenty. Most of the palace guards turned to dust. The survivors took to their heels. I retched up a mouthful of stomach acid. Killing wasn’t something I could learn to enjoy.
    Harry kept the hammer down, and we smashed through a set of ironwork gates. There were marble stairs up ahead. We took them like we had square wheels. The lovely gardens were all around us, fountains and geometric beds of flowers. Some pretty women with bare backs were lounging on the lawns.
    A hot beam of red laser light speared down from one of the palace’s slim watchtowers. The beam burned a hole in our Cadillac’s hood, and then the engine died.
    â€œI’ll handle that,” said Harry. He aimed his time-reversing ray gun at the distant laser cannon. Our engine started back up, the hole in the hood sealed over, and the laser energy returned to its source. Smoke poured out of that slim minaret—smoke and screams.
    Our car stumbled up a last marble staircase and coughed to a stop. The four of us jumped out, guns at the ready. We were standing under a huge, pillared portico. Before us was the palace entrance, a Moorish arch with massive bronze doors. The doors were open and unguarded.
    I felt weak and sick, but Harry’s drunkenness was miraculously gone. Master of space and time.
    Sondra was in high gear. “What’s your anti-self going to look like, Harry? Tad and Joe say it’s a giant slug. Let’s be sure to steal some jewels after we kill it. I guess you know it’s already eleventwenty-five? We better hurry. I can’t wait for my friend Donna to see my new look. Maybe I’ll go on TV. Do you think Dr. Bitter will approve?”
    â€œThat big Gary Herber’s in the central courtyard,” said Tad. “Let’s hang real tight.”
    He went in first, then Harry and Sondra, then me.
    Something dropped onto the nape of my neck just as I walked through the door .
    Oh, no! The soft moist Herber-slug slid down between my shoulder blades and plugged itself into my nervous system. I felt a wild tingling.
    â€œduck into the next doorway,” said a little voice in my head. The voice of the parasitic glob that had just taken over my will. I struggled to yell to the others, but instead I whipped