That could be disastrous for us. I looked at the others, but Tananda and Bunny waited for me to make the final decision. I wished, not for the first time, that Aahz was here, either to pick the sorry Wuhs up by his shirt front and shake him or to let him crawl away and hide.
"All right," I agreed at last. 'Try and find out where the spectacles are being made, and if your friends know anything else. We'll be back as soon as we can." Wensley was blubberingly grateful.
"You are as wise as you are mighty," he gasped out. I stepped back and wrung out my soggy shirt. By the disgusted look on her face, Tananda wasn't going to snuggle up to him any time in the future.
"Very well," Zol stated. "We have the coordinates. Will you do the honors, or should I?"
"Allow me," I said, reaching into my belt pouch for a pinch of magikal flash powder to cover up the fact that I was going to use our D-hopper. Wensley clambered to his feet, staying far enough away that we would have had to lunge to get him into the sphere of the device's influence. He waved a brief farewell, then took to his heels again with the expression of a deermoose surprised by lightning. The light blazed up, imprinting an image on my retinas of the Wuhs with the expression of a deermoose surprised by lightning.
"Sad," Tananda tsked, as we gathered around the D-hopper. "I thought we were getting somewhere with him."
Bunny fondled Bytina, who now rode in a color-coordinated pouch on her belt. "Maybe he needs a computer."
"Maybe he needs a personality transplant," Tananda suggested, dryly.
"Those can have some nasty side-effects," Zol frowned. I looked from one to the other, wondering how one went about transplanting a personality. Would it be like possession? What if the new mind didn't like the body it was put into?
But I had no more time to speculate upon higher philosophical processes. At the press of the control stud we found ourselves on a main street in a prosperous-looking city under a blazing hot sun. People, dressed in dark colors in spite of the day's heat, crowded the wooden sidewalk that ran past the gray stone-fronted buildings, pushing by us without a word of courtesy. A huge Scammie in a coat that reached his knees rammed right into me and kept going. Caught off guard, I teetered for a moment on the curb, waving my arms furiously for balance. With a cry I stumbled off into the path of a beast drawing a carriage, bearing down on me at a gallop. The animal, a six-legged, barrel-chested, long-tailed creature that looked like a cross between a rat and a horse, pawed the air with three-toed feet and let out a loud squeak of alarm. The driver hauled back on his reins, sniffed hard at the air, wrenched the animal to the side and kept going. He didn't say a thing. His expression remained unperturbed, as though he hadn't seen me, or even observed that his dray animal had nearly had an accident. I noticed that he was wearing dark glasses against the brightness of the day. Perhaps the Scammies had poor eyesight, and their psychometric talent or keen sense of smell allowed traffic to flow along as well as it did.
Tananda grabbed one of my arms and hauled me back onto the curb and up a flight of stone steps where Bunny and Zol had retreated to get out of the crush. We found ourselves on a hilltop overlooking a main street. Above us was a solid-looking government building of some kind, with prosperous Scammies coming and going through the molded bronze doors.
"I think it would help if we blended in," Zol noted.
I agreed. I stopped to study the Scammies. They tended to be taller than Klahds, with greeny-bronze faces and hands, all the flesh that was exposed by their garments, long-sleeved robes that swept the ground. The faces were inverted triangles. A round mouth down near the sharply pointed chin was nearly concealed by the most distinctive feature of the Scammie physiognomy: the nose. The average nose, ridged and glistening like a segmented worm, was longer than my hand, more like a junior trunk. The huge nostril, for there was only one, ran upward from just above the little mouth to right between the eyes. Those I could not see well, because nearly everyone on the street was wearing dark glasses.
'The spectacles!" I exclaimed, pointing.
"Disguise first," Zol cautioned me, as a uniformed Scammie, clearly an authority figure of some kind, turned his trunk in our direction. He started sniffing. Quickly, I formed a mental image of the five of us, then erased our features and superimposed Scammie mouths and noses, surmounting them with glasses to disguise our eyes. It helped that the natives, too, were upright creatures with their eyes on the front of their heads. I had little time to do more than clothe us all in identical robes before I bent down to take a good sniff of the nearest passerby. I wasn't that proficient at non-visual illusions, but if fitting in here meant disguising our natural aroma, I was certainly going to try. Their body odor was pleasant, like oranges with vanilla overtones. The police officer stopped sniffing. He tilted his triangular head with an air of confusion, then turned back to directing traffic.
"Mmm," Tananda smiled, lifting a wrist to her nose. "Nice. You can design a perfume for me any time, handsome."
Gleep stared at me with puzzlement in his round eyes. They were now black like the rat-horse's, with the rest of his form to match, because it was the only nonverbal creature I'd seen yet. He was troubled because not only did I not look like me, but I didn't smell right.
"It's okay, Gleep," I reassured him, petting him behind the ears. He looked dubious, but my voice was still famil- iar. I put my hand on his head and took a really good look around.
It had been only four days since we had lost track of the Pervect Ten, but they hadn't wasted a moment. It had not simply been the man in the carriage wearing dark glasses. Everybody we could see, in every direction, was wearing colored spectacles exactly like the pair I now had in my belt pouch. The reason the Scammies crowded one another so rudely on the sidewalks was that none of them was paying attention to where he or she was going. They bumped into vehicles, walls and one another, but no one seemed to get angry or upset. It was eerie. I had never seen traffic accidents resolved without swearing before.
"They all seem to be very happy," Bunny observed.
"They are under a spell," Zol confirmed, his voice rising with concern. "Their minds are under the control of the glasses. Tell them, Master Skeeve! Take your case to the common Scammie. Help them! Only the truth can save them now! Speak to them and set them free!"
His alarm galvanized me into action. I saw before me another world on the brink of falling under the influence of the Pervect Ten. We had been too slow to stop the infiltration, but those demons wouldn't keep the Scammies under their thumb, not if I could help it. I ran to the top of the stairs, spread out my arms and cried out to the people of Scamaroni.
"Take off your glasses!" I shouted. "They're part of a plot by a group of females from Perv who want to enslave your entire dimension. They're enchanting you! They are poisoning your minds!"
THIRTEEN
"Do you really want them eating off your hand?"
My voice died away. I looked around me for the thousands of eager, raised faces, grateful that someone had come to liberate them from their involuntary thralldom.
The trot-trot of rat-horse feet, the rumble of carriage wheels, the trudge-trudge-trudge of thousands of feet did not come to a halt. In fact, no one paused for a moment. I couldn't believe it. Nobody understood what kind of danger they were in! I gawked at the resounding wave of apathy that greeted my announcement. Didn't they care?
"Take the initiative, Master Skeeve," Zol urged me. "Use that Klahdish determination!"
That steeled my resolve. What I needed was an authority, an important citizen, to set an example by casting off the Pervect Ten's device. I cast around me.