Something was rising over the mountains, unseen by the deranged chef, like a pale and enormous yellow moon lofting up through the clouds. Without letting himself follow the arc of its rise, 6Pack calculated the path of its descent. He took a few steps back, drawing the chef into the point of impact.
“It’s no use trying to escape. No one knows where you are. And soon the old man will have disposed of the remains.”
The shadow of the falling sphere began to grow around Nutrimancer’s feet. At the last instant, the chef glanced up and cried, “Aiee! Wintermelon!”
As the titan fruit smashed upon the peak, flattening the chef, 6Pack leapt from the crag. The sky went black and so did he.
He awoke in a soft bed, an extravagant suite, as Lady 3Bean walked through the door with a breakfast tray in her hands.
“You were wonderful,” she said. “Would you like something to eat?”
6Pack shook his head and regarded the rashers and cantaloupe with distaste.
“Never again,” he said.
“Nutrimancer” copyright 1987 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1987.
THE LIQUOR CABINET OF DR. MALIKUDZU
Bad news for the janitor; good luck for Dr. Malikudzu. Sometime in the middle of the night-shift, after a fight with Max the supervisor over who was to empty biohazard bins in the animal experimentation labs, young Mr. Coover let go his already slender grip on discretion and began unadvisedly opening random drawers in the offices of the principal investigators. He had seen too many bad things peeking at him emptily from the plastic shrouded hollows of the laboratory bins; he wanted to know what got into the heads of these doctors to make them go after living meat the way they did. Drawer after drawer yielded nothing but paper and paperclips, the occasional stash of change for the vending machines, stale fragments of pastry. But finally, in the office of one Dr. Malikudzu, he came upon a cache of tiny liquor bottles, of the sort distributed by airlines. With a grin he settled back in the squeaky office chair, unscrewed the cap on a vodka bottle, and tipped the contents down his throat, never noticing that the paper seal on the neck of the bottle had already been broken.
It burned like vodka going down, but the taste was all wrong. And at the bottom young Mr. Coover was unsettled to find that it had dregs—namely a little rubbery bit like a cheese curd, which slipped past his tongue before he could spit it out. Bleh! He held the bottle up to the light, but there was nothing remaining in it to suggest that it had ever held anything but what it claimed.
Suddenly queasy, he scarcely had time to drop the bottle back into the drawer—knocking over several others as if they were bowling pins—and stagger to his rolling garbage can, therein disgorging all that he had drunk and quite a bit more besides. He hung weakly over the rim of the huge reeking barrel, his mops and brooms clattering to the floor, and waited there in case his stomach might surge again. He felt as if he were breaking out in needles, his stomach seared by acids. His eventual thought was that things would be complicated if he were discovered in this office, where the drawers had obviously been ransacked. To hell with straightening up—he was sick. He had meant to quit anyway, now that he’d saved some money. Let them try to track him down. Doctors weren’t supposed to keep wet bars in their drawers; he probably wouldn’t be reported. But Max, his superior, was another matter.
He stooped to recover his brooms and mops, and his guts seized the opportunity to stab him without mercy. Then he staggered from the office, pushing his cart and barrel ahead of him through aisles of black acid-proof counter tops lined with glassware and fancy instruments that looked like televisions without screens. His stomach spasmed, forcing a scream from him. The sound echoed through the lab, brittle and cold as the Pyrex. He thought he heard an answering cry from down the hall. Was Max coming to check up on him?
Get out of here now. Out of here. It sounded like there was a jungle in the walls, apes screaming; but that beating of metal bars would have been out of place in the wild.
He pushed against another door, this one with a yellow pane set in it. Locked. He fished out his skeleton key, ignoring the warning symbols on the glass. Something more than biohazards here. He pushed the door open and the screech of animals overwhelmed him. Monkeys stared at him from rows of unlit cages: unlit, but their eyes glowed with a sick yellow light, the color of the glass pane. In fact, the pane was clear; this yellow radiance had colored it.
“Oh God…” He put a hand to his belly, rubbed gently, wishing the pain would stop. He had swallowed something, he knew. Something like a tequila worm, but still alive. It was roaming around inside him, not bothering to follow the twists and turns of his guts—no, it was boring a way straight through. The shortest way to a man’s heart…
At that thought, he knew that it had found this most prized muscle. A hot yellow exultance swept through him—alien to his thoughts, but arising alongside them. His heart quivered and there came a soft jabbing. No more pain. The muscle stopped beating, his eyes bulged, and then the organ throbbed and went to work at a far different pace. His blood flooded with yellow light; it spilled from his eyes and lit the dark comers.
He smiled. A man was calling him, coming down the hall. Max.
“Coover? What are you doing in there? It’s your ass this time, shithead. We don’t clean these rooms.”
Young Mr. Coover met him at the door. His heart beat a rapid yellow accompaniment to the stifled gasp, the wet rending of muscle and bone, and the arrhythmic sound of dribbling on the easy-to-clean linoleum tile.
This done, Mr. Coover found one of the larger cages in a corner of the room and opened the wire mesh door. The occupant gazed at him with soulful yellow eyes, understanding why he must squeeze it by the throat until the vertebrae were mingled in the cooling jellies of the neck. His eyes shone all the more brightly as he climbed into the cage and pulled the door shut after him. Then, until morning, he sulked and howled like all the rest.
It was a short trip from the simian labs to the psychiatric institute. Dr. Leslie Malikudzu watched from his high office window as the strait-jacketed figure of the young janitor was led around the back of the opposite building by several security men and three white-coated doctors. He could still see the boy’s eyes in his memory: the faint residue of luminescence dying from them in the daylight. He had neglected to mention the empty Vodka bottle to the police. Now he returned to the drawer and examined the other bottles in order to ascertain that they were in fact all quite full of stasis fluid, and that the tiny flesh niblets inside each remained immobile.
Thank God the janitor had drunk the stuff, he thought; must have held quite a kick, too. He hated to think of what might have happened had the bottle broken on the floor and the flesh-tag escaped. It could have struck from anywhere. Now, however, it was safely lodged in a companionable heart; its presence, he had determined, had struck the boy dumb, driven him utterly mad. It seemed doubtful that he would ever regain speech sufficient to describe how he had been driven to murder his supervisor and the ape whose cage he’d occupied. This was fortunate for Dr. Malikudzu, who was still years away from publishing his tentative findings, and much farther than that from asking permission of the Human Experimentation Committee to pursue his work into animals of a higher order. The Simian Commission did not know exactly what he had done to the apes now in his keeping; or rather, the experiments they had authorized were not the ones he had conducted, although they bore a superficial resemblance. He could thank Mr. Coover that his work had been accelerated by perhaps a decade and its benefits to him might be immediately forthcoming.