The explanation was long-winded, and I was getting sick of “Love Sold in Doses,” which, for all its hip innuendos, is, after all, just another tune. So I turned the volume up to ten.
“This project is organized in three phases,” he went on hurriedly. “Individual testing, mass testing, and diffusion. We have finished phase one, the individual testing, with completely satisfactory results, as usual. We always have completely satisfactory results.”
At this point, “Hey, Chief, wha’s happenin’?” Little Laszlo chose to manifest himself again. “Why you tellin’ him all that stuff, huh?”
“Love Sold in Doses” collapsed. So did Ktch. Pity.
“How did you do that?” For a lobster, he sounded downright respectful.
I shrugged my shoulders eloquently. A wisp of pressure began to make itself felt in my head, then turned tail and ran away. Groovy.
“Laszlo Scott, why did you not tell me about this?”
“ ’Bout what, man? Why didn’ I tell you…”
“Yes. I must think about you, Laszlo Scott. Also about you, Spy. I — no, We have been misinformed. Something must be done. Yes. Come with me.”
He led Laszlo out of the room. I whistled “Love Sold in Doses” hopefullishly.
“Stop that!” the lobster yelled. I did. Why not?
Laszlo and the lobster were away some fifteen minutes, during which I wondered where the hell my beloved roommate, manager, and master planner was. I also noticed, for the first time in awhile, that I was disgracefully wet and beginning to smell, and that I still hadn’t had lunch. I wove these three themes into a disgruntled fugue and waited for further developments.
Somewhere in the near distance a voice, probably Laszlo’s, made odd sounds expressive of distress. This was little comfort.
Then Ktch came back. Alone. He’d got his deep blue color back and his eyestalks untangled, but he looked, to say the least, a bit offended.
“What you did,” he said hurtly, “why can Laszlo Scott not do the same? Were you taught to do this? Where did you learn it?”
I whistled another half-bar of “Love Sold in Doses.”
“No,” he surrendered.
Out of unabashed nastiness and the absence of lunch, I whistled through the whole tune once, with flourishes. He kept time with his claws.
“I’m afraid,” he said when I was quite through, “that I shall have to resort to methods I myself deplore. But you are too strong for our usual procedures. Quite unexpectedly strong. Nothing had prepared us for… Ah, well. You yourself have forced us to this point. We shall have to use torture, alas.”
Torture?
“Of course, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world,” Ktch explained, while setting up the electronic devices I’d worried about earlier. “In fact, I don’t believe I could, really. Just thinking about it makes my eyestalks twitch. Conditioning, you know. There.”
He flipped a switch. The devices — there were four of them that I could see, all very bulky, gray, and ominous, with lots of knobs and dials and, on the biggest one, silvery thin tentacular extrusions that were probably going to be attached to me somehow — the devices hummed rather threateningly, lights lit up and flashed or not as they saw fit, a psychedelic op-art disk on the tentacled device rotated with obvious hypnotic intent, and the air around me suddenly grew heavy. Ktch looked as pleased as an azure lobster can.
“These won’t actually hurt,” he said. “That is, there’s no physical pain involved.” He started attaching tentacles to me. “Of course, if you choose to interpret the sensations they produce as pain — and you probably will — well, that’s your doing, not ours.”
There were lots of tentacles, and he fastened them to me in all sorts of unlikely places, many of them personal. I kept a stiff upper lip and wondered where Mike was.
“This is the first time we’ve used these instruments here,” he apologized at last. “With Laszlo Scott they were not needed — or so we were led to believe. In fact, the last creatures we used these on were amphibious, if that’s the word for it, and had four sexes. A charming arrangement but quite impractical. One is best, or at the most three, but Four…” He waved a fluent feeler in mock despair, while I silently vetoed his opinions.
“Anyway,” he went on, “the calibration is perhaps a trifle rough. I’m sorry about that. We’ll watch your reactions and refine our settings, but that will take some time. Here goes.”
He flipped another switch, I braced myself, and the torture commenced. Like everything else so far, it was impressive, if that’s the word for it. Yeah, impressive.
13
BY THEN it was eight o’clock, and my disappearance was beginning to attract some belated attention.
Sean and Charley Wainright noticed it first, which was to be expected. “Where’s Chester?” Chaz bellowed when Sean wandered into The Mess. “He’s late.”
“He ain’t here? I’m lookin’ for him; figured he’d be here. Where’s he at?”
“He’s late. Do you know where he is?”
“No, man. I thought he was Here.” And so on for a few minutes. Communication tends to be a bit problematical in the Village.
Sean checked the back room, where he found the rest of The Tripouts pleasantly stoned but no trace of me at all. “Where’s Chester?” everyone asked everyone else. Sean split to seek me in The Garden.
Where I was was being fiendishly tortured by the inhuman devices of a dozen large blue lobsters bent on conquering the Earth, but that was neither here nor there. At The Garden of Eden, Sean found Mike and Andrew Blake. Help, so to speak, was on the way.
“Hey, Michael the Theodore Bear, you know where Chester’s at?”
Mike said, “At The Mess, no?” and Andrew said, “That’s an interesting question. Do you mean it? I mean, all of it?”
“No, man, he ain’t there,” Sean said. “I figured he was Here.”
“In a manner of speaking, he is,” Andrew Blake explained, but Mike said, “Oh shit,” very softly, and I was as good as saved, in a manner of speaking.
“Pardon me,” said Mike, rising abruptly to his feet. “I seem to have forgotten something. Pardon me.”
He rushed out of The Garden, closely followed by Sean, while Andy said, “It’s hard to tell about Chester. Sometimes he’s…” then noticed that he’d lost his audience and quit.
Mike and Sean took a taxi home — $1.37 plus tip, cash, Mike having forgotten his General Credit Card. They had to pool their resources to make it, and the driver was eloquently displeased with his tip.
“What’s happening?” Sean begged as they ran up the stairs.
“I may have goofed,” Mike explained.
They reached the pad, dashed to Mike’s room, and, after a bit of confused scrabbling, found the radio on the floor where it’d somehow fallen when Yvonne called.
“Chester?” Michael asked the radio. “Chester? Do you read me? Come in, Chester.”
“You don’t gotta yell like that,” Sean winced.
“Sorry,” yelling. “Chester? Can you hear me?”
It took him awhile to admit that I probably couldn’t hear him. Then, “Oh shit,” he dropped the radio and ran out of the pad, closely followed by Sean.
“What’s happening, man? You gotta tell me what’s happening!” Sean was getting excited.
“I did goof.” Mike seldom made such damaging admissions, but Sean didn’t know him well enough yet to appreciate this.
Ever since the St. Mark’s Place disturbances of a few years back, cabs had carefully avoided our neighborhood, so Mike and Sean rushed back to The Garden on foot, more healthy exercise than Mike’d had in years. En route, gasping, Mike explained the situation.
“We better call the cops,” was Sean’s suggestion.
“You kidding? You don’t know much about New York cops, my lad. They wouldn’t do a thing, not in a case like this. Missing rock-n-roll musician. Right. They’d only laugh. That I can do for myself Listen. Hah. Hah-hah. See? Nothing to it.” Michael was upset.