"Suppose it were a s.p.a.ceship-sized thing. Wouldn't the gee forces get intolerable?"

"Not a bit. You're in free fall, just like orbiting a planet. Zero gravity, to the people aboard the s.p.a.ceship."

"You couldn't go any faster than the speed of light, though," I said. "It doesn't get by relativity."

He picked up a ball bearing and stared at it, frowning. "I'd have to say no." He tossed it onto the sheet and it bounced over the lip to rattle across the floor.

"Certainly within the context of my paper, I didn't say anything about exceeding the speed of light. I did want to get it published."

"You saw a catch to it?"

"There's a paradox . . . having to do with the allowable range of initial conditions.

I'm waiting to see whether anybody notices it." He gestured at the rubber sheet. "If you were to interpret the paradox in terms of this model, well, it would be like changing the elasticity of the rubber, at the point where the BB is. Or being able to reach up from the other side of the sheet and twist it out of shape.

"The net result, looking at it one way, is that it goes faster than the speed of light.

Another way to look at it, which is no more comfortable, is that . . . well, it shrinks s.p.a.ce. Like your black box, it makes distances shorter. You accelerate for a certain period-falling, so to speak-and then reverse the process, decelerating, and you wind up having gone much farther than you seem to have gone. Much farther than you should be able to go, on the energy expended."

That was enough for me. "Would you be willing to explain this to some friends of mine-other people who are helping me with this thing?"

He shook his head. "I don't want any publicity:"

"Nothing like that. They aren't even writers. We'd just get together for dinner and chat."

The word "dinner" provoked some interest. Science fiction writers and junior professors have something in common. "They aren't a bunch of nuts, now?"

"One of them is pretty weird-but levelheaded." Flat on top, actually. "You might get a kick out of him. He's even taller than you are."

"That would be novel. Okay, go ahead and set it up. I'm free most nights."

I called Lydia from his phone and set it up for that evening, then went off to my local check-bouncing service to get enough for our train fares.

I don't recall now what I actually expected in the way of a reaction, when Lazlo Crane confronted Seven. He was remarkably subdued.

Lydia had charmed him with herself and with a magnificent dinner of duck a l'orange, the cooking of which masked Seven's citric effluvium. After dessert she took out the blue tube and for the first time mentioned the reason for Crane's presence.

"Lazlo, there's someone we'd like you to talk to. About the paper you wrote."

To Seven's credit, he went around the long way, so as not to sneak up from behind.

As he walked across the great room to where we were sitting, I watched Lazlo carefully. He didn't freak or faint or even go bug-eyed or stammer. Both eyebrows went up a bit, true, and he blinked. Then he looked at the blue tube and at me. "It's not really a story, then," he said.

"No. It's all true."

He nodded. "I didn't think you wrote that sort of thing."

They talked for a couple of hours, Lazlo questioning Seven closely about the range of his machine, duration of voyages, the sensations he felt, and so forth. Seven showed some fantastic pictures of the places he'd been, like home movies but with three dimensions and smell.

Then Lydia and I opened the garage door and checked to make sure the coast was clear, and the two of them took off for a joyride in the black machine, which was silent and nearly invisible. They came back ninety minutes later, having been around the moon.

When we asked whether he could fix it, Lazlo said he wasn't sure. "It's not so much like a blacksmith trying to fix a car. More like an auto mechanic trying to repair an atom bomb, having read a couple of popular science articles. We need sort of a back- yard Manhattan Project: people, secrecy, money, influence ..."

"You get the people," Lydia said. "Leave the rest to me."

"Wait," I said. "What about safety? I thought Seven said that thing could pull a planet apart."

"Maybe it could," Lazlo admitted. "That's why we'll be doing the blacksmith part on the moon."

Lydia had quite a bit of money, but not enough to swing a project of this magnitude. That's how Seven and the Stars was born.

Seven had home movies of 115 alien worlds. If we set up his projector inside a room with white walls and a white floor, it was just like absolute reality. All I had to do was go into the room with a gas mask and a good half-inch color tape machine, and we had instant doc.u.mentary. Seven rambled on about the places into a tape recorder, and I rewrote his monologue into a sort of cross between National Geographic specials and the venerable Mork & Mindy-tongue-in-cheek science fiction, with special effects that no one in the industry could match.

We paid union dues for a platoon of nonexistent animators and special-effects people, made a package of thirteen shows, and showed them to all five networks. The bidding was furious. CBS won, and they ran Seven and the Stars right after Ninety Minutes Sunday evening-and within four weeks we were outdrawing our lead-in, our commercials getting the highest prices in the industry.

We were a real mystery. Our corporation owned an ex-dude ranch in Nevada, with security to match the sophistication of our supposed special effects. That was where Lazlo and his gang were, of course, when they weren't riding Seven's bowling ball to the moon.

Seven himself was a slight problem. He had a great natural delivery for my lines, but he got sophisticated, started mugging for laughs. I had to tone him down. There's nothing very funny about a cross between Jack Benny and a gila monster.

In a way, it's a race against time. We've done not quite half of Seven's worlds: when we run out, the series is over. But it looks as if we are going to make it. Lazlo's people have gotten to the point where they can open the gray box and poke around with the whatzis inside. I keep looking up into the sky to see if the moon's still there.

I'll hate to see it end. Right now I have the reputation of having produced the most imaginative science fiction ever-from the Thought-Eaters of Prrn to the Sensuous Siblings of Sirius VI-and sooner or later the whole world will know that it wasn't fiction at all.

So I'll have to return all the Hugos and Nebulas and stumble back into obscurity, with nothing to comfort me but a brilliant and beautiful wife-and the largest residuals in the history of television. n.o.body ever said a writer's life was easy.

From the totally frivolous, now, to the rather gritty.

Among the various countries I've visited, Morocco stands out in my memory as having been the most unfriendly. I've never been anyplace where the people were so openly and immediately hostile toward you for the crime of being a foreigner-not even in Vietnam, where we were actively engaged in turning their country into a dioxin-tainted ash heap. I'm sure there are many good and gracious Moroccans, and in fact I've met some in America and Spain and England. Maybe in Morocco there's a law requiring that sort of person to stay indoors when foreigners are around.

At any rate, it's a natural setting for a story, since the essence of "story" is trouble.

They give you plenty of that, from the first body search on entering the country to the last bribe you have to pay to get out.

I started to write this as a horror story, but partway through decided that wasn't necessary; there was plenty of weirdness and trouble without invoking the supernatural. Besides, I was going to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the time, and craved legitimacy. If I could place a story in the Atlantic or Harper's they would have to admit I was a real author, not just a token invader from the outer s.p.a.ce of commercial writing.

After about a year of collecting rejection letters from all the finest places, my agent suggested I pursue the original plan and put the horror back in. He even offered to buy the story for his anthology Dark Forces (Viking, 1980). Suitably chastised by the mainstream microcosm, I slunk back to my typewriter and expanded the story to include a dark force indeed.

LINDSAY AND THE RED CITY BLUES.

"The ancient red city of Marrakesh," his guidebook said, "is the last large oasis for travelers moving south into the Sahara. It is the most exotic of Moroccan cities, where Arab Africa and Black Africa meet in a setting that has changed but little in the past thousand years."

In midafternoon, the book did not mention, it becomes so hot that even the flies stop moving.

The air conditioner in his window hummed impressively but neither moved nor cooled the air. He had complained three times, and the desk clerk responded with two shrugs and a blank stare. By two o'clock his little warren was unbearable. He fled to the street, where it was hotter.

Scott Lindsay was a salesman who demonstrated chemical gla.s.sware for a large scientific-supply house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Like all Washingtonians, Lindsay thought that a person who could survive summer on the banks of the Potomac could survive it anywhere. He saved up six weeks of vacation time and flew to Europe in late July. Paris was pleasant enough, and the Pyrenees were even cool, but n.o.body had told him that on August first all of Europe goes on vacation; every good hotel room has been sewed up for six months, restaurants are jammed or closed, and you spend all your time making bad travel connections to cities where only the most expensive hotels have accommodations.

In Nice a Canadian said he had just come from Morocco, where it was hotter than h.e.l.l but there were practically no tourists this time of year. Scott looked wistfully over the poisoned but still blue Mediterranean, felt the pressure of twenty million fellow travelers at his back, remembered Bogie, and booked the next flight to Casablanca.

Casablanca combined the charm of Pittsburgh with the climate of Dallas. The still air was thick with dust from high-rise construction. He picked up a guidebook and riffled through it and, on the basis of a few paragraphs, took the predawn train to Marrakesh.

"The Red City," it went on, "takes its name from the color of the local sandstone from which the city and its ramparts were built." It would be more accurate, Scott reflected, though less alluring, to call it the Pink City. The Dirty Pink City. He stum- bled along the sidewalk on the shady side of the street. The twelve-inch strip of shade at the edge of the sidewalk was crowded with sleeping beggars. The heat was so dry he couldn't even sweat.

He pa.s.sed two bars that were closed and stepped gratefully into a third. It was a Moslem bar, a milk bar, no booze, but at least it was shade. Two young men slumped at the bar, arguing in guttural whispers, and a pair of ancients in burnooses sat at a table playing a static game of checkers. An oscillating fan pushed the hot air and dust around. He raised a finger at the bartender, who regarded him with stolid hostility, and ordered in schoolboy French a small bottle of Vichy water, carbonated, without ice, and, out of deference to the guidebook, a gla.s.s of hot mint tea. The bartender brought the mint tea and a liter bottle of Sidi Harazim water, not carbonated, with a gla.s.s of ice. Scott tried to argue with the man but he only stared and kept repeating the price. He finally paid and dumped the ice (which the guidebook had warned him about) into the ashtray. The young men at the bar watched the transaction with sleepy indifference.

The mint tea was an aromatic infusion of mint leaves in hot sugar water. He sipped and was surprised, and perversely annoyed, to find it quite pleasant. He took a paperback novel out of his pocket and read the same two paragraphs over and over, feeling his eyes track, unable to concentrate in the heat.

He put the book down and looked around with slow deliberation, trying to be impressed by the alienness of the place. Through the open front of the bar he could see across the street, where a small park shaded the outskirts of the Djemaa El Fna, the largest open-air market in Morocco and, according to the guidebook, the most exciting and colorful; which itself was the gateway to the mysterious labyrinthine medina, where even this moment someone was being murdered for his pocket change, goats were being used in ways of which Allah did not approve, men were smoking a mixture of camel dung and opium, children were merchandised like groceries; where dark men and women would do anything for a price, and the price would not be high. Scott touched his pocket unconsciously, and the hard bulge of the condom was still there.

The best condoms in the world are packaged in a blue plastic cylinder, squared off along the prolate axis, about the size of a small matchbox. The package is a marvel of technology, held fast by a combination of geometry and sticky tape, and a cool- headed man, under good lighting conditions, can open it in less than a minute. Scott had bought six of them in the drugstore in Dulles International, and had opened only one. He hadn't opened it for the Parisian woman who had looked like a prost.i.tute but had returned his polite proposition with a storm of outrage. He opened it for the fat customs inspector at the Casablanca airport, who had to have its function explained to him, who held it between two dainty fingers like a dead sea thing and called his compatriots over for a look.

The Djemaa El Fna was closed against the heat, pale-orange dusty tents slack and pallid in the stillness. And the trees through which he stared at the open-air market, the souk, were also covered with pale dust; the sky was so pale as to be almost white, and the street and sidewalk were the color of dirty chalk. It was like a faded watercolor displayed under too strong a light.

"Hey, mister." A slim Arab boy, evidently in his early teens, had slipped into the place and was standing beside Lindsay. He was well scrubbed and wore Western- style clothing, discreetly patched.

"Hey, mister," he repeated. "You American?"

"Nu. Eeg bin Jugoslay."

The boy nodded. "You from New York? I got four friends New York."

"Jugoslay."

"You from Chicago? I got four friends Chicago. No, five. Five friends Chicago."

"Jugoslav," he said.

"Where in U.S. you from?" He took a melting ice cube from the ashtray, buffed it on his sleeve, popped it into his mouth, crunched.

"New Caledonia," Scott said.

"Don't like ice? Ice is good this time day." He repeated the process with another cube. "New what?" he mumbled.

"New Caledonia. Little place in the Rockies, between Georgia and Wisconsin. I don't like polluted ice."

"No, mister, this ice okay. Bottle-water ice." He rattled off a stream of Arabic at the bartender, who answered with a single harsh syllable. "Come on, I guide you through medina."

"No."

"I guide you free. Student, English student. I take you free, take you my father's factory."

"You'll take me, all right."

"Okay, we go now. No touris' s.h.i.t, make good deal."

Well, Lindsay, you wanted experiences. How about being knocked over the head and raped by a goat? "All right, I'll go.

But no pay."

"Sure, no pay." He took Scott by the hand and dragged him out of the bar, into the park.

"Is there any place in the medina where you can buy cold beer?"

"Sure, lots of place. Ice beer. You got cigarette?"

"Don't smoke."

"That's okay, you buy pack up here." He pointed at a gazebo-shaped concession on the edge of the park.

"h.e.l.l, no. You find me a beer and I might buy you some cigarettes." They came out of the shady park and crossed the packed-earth plaza of the Djemaa El Fna. Dust stung his throat and nostrils, but it wasn't quite as hot as it had been earlier; a slight breeze had come up. One industrious merchant was rolling up the front flap of his tent, exposing racks of leather goods. He called out, "Hey, you buy!" but Scott ignored him, and the boy made a fist gesture, thumb erect between the two first fingers.

Scott had missed one section of the guidebook: "Never visit the medina without a guide; the streets are laid out in crazy, unpredictable angles and someone who doesn't live there will be hopelessly lost in minutes. The best guides are the older men or young Americans who live there for the cheap narcotics; with them you can arrange the price ahead of time, usually about 5 dirham ($1.10). Under no circ.u.mstances hire one of the street urchins who pose as students and offer to guide you for free; you will be cheated or even beaten up and robbed."

They pa.s.sed behind the long double row of tents and entered the medina through the Bab Agnou gateway. The main street of the place was a dirt alley some eight feet wide, flanked on both sides by small shops and stalls, most of which were closed, either with curtains or steel shutters or with the proprietor dozing on the stoop. None of the shops had a wall on the side fronting the alley, but the ones that served food usually had chest-high counters. If they pa.s.sed an open shop the merchant would block their way and importune them in urgent simple French or English, plucking at Scott's sleeve as they pa.s.sed.

It was surprisingly cool in the medina, the sun's rays partially blocked by wooden lattices suspended over the alleyway. There was a roast-chestnut smell of semolina being parched, with accents of garlic and strange herbs smoldering. Slight tang of ex- haust fumes and sickly-sweet hint of garbage and sewage hidden from the sun. The boy led him down a side street, and then another. Scott couldn't tell the position of the sun and was quickly disoriented.

"Where the h.e.l.l are we going?"

"Cold beer. You see." He plunged down an even smaller alley, dark and sinister, and Lindsay followed, feeling unarmed.

They huddled against a damp wall while a white-haired man on an antique one- cylinder motor scooter hammered by. "How much farther is this place? I'm not going to-"

"Here, one corner." The boy dragged him around the corner and into a musty- smelling dark shop. The shopkeeper, small and round, smiled gold teeth and greeted the boy by name, Abdul. "The word for beer is 'bera,' " he said. Scott repeated the word to the fat little man and Abdul added something. The man opened two beers and set them down on the counter, along with a pack of cigarettes.

It's a new little Arab, Lindsay, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption. He paid and gave Abdul his cigarettes and beer. "Aren't you Moslem? I thought Moslems didn't drink."

"h.e.l.l yes, man." He stuck his finger down the neck of the bottle and flicked away a drop of beer, then tilted the bottle up and drained half of it in one gulp. Lindsay sipped at his. It was warm and sour.

"What you do in the States, man?" He lit a cigarette and held it awkwardly.

Chemical gla.s.sware salesman? "I drive a truck." The acrid Turkish tobacco smoke stung his eyes.

"Make lots of money."

"No, I don't." He felt foolish saying it. World traveler, Lindsay, you spent more on your ticket than this boy will see in his life.

"Let's go my father's factory."

"What does your father make?"

"All kinds of things. Rugs."

"I wouldn't know what to do with a rug."