“Nothing. I gave them to the chick across the hall. She’ll take Anything. Thinks it’s hip or something.”
From the Heller-Pratt pad Laszlo went straight home, though it wasn’t even two o’clock yet.
Mike stationed himself in the candy store doorway across the street and watched Laszlo’s windows. Oddly dressed persons of unknown age and gender tried to proposition him in foreign languages, but he ignored them. Scrawny kids trying to look mean in skin-tight leather slouched by muttering obscure insults, and he ignored them. A rather pretty long-haired chick in standard artist’s garb walked by, slowed down, smiled at him and walked on, and he even managed to ignore Her. Michael meant business.
After fifteen minutes of this, the lights went off in Laszlo’s pad. Mike didn’t believe a word of it. He stood firm in the candy store doorway, waiting for Laszlo to try some funny business, for upward of an hour, or until two wary fuzz approached and one of them, hand poised above his pistol, snarled. “All right, buddy, what’s your problem?”
“Nothing, officer, nothing at all. Just catching my breath. Long walk, you know.”
“What does it take you, an hour to catch your breath? C’mon, buddy, move along before I run ya in.”
So Michael went home, feeling deeply unfulfilled.
I was motion in the boundless universe. I was the square root of minus one. I was covered with thick beige fuzz that moved of its own accord. I was ten feet tall.
I was a pastrami ice-cream cone. I was the key of G minor. I was full of tiny gears and printed circuits and my batteries needed charging.
I was pregnant and I knew the people responsible. I was law west of the Klamath River. I was without form, and void. I was a long-playing microgroove record.
I saw the best minds of my generation and I was appalled. I was a platinum gas tank. I was an army advancing toward I was an army.
I was the ghost of Christmas past. I was the rabbit in the moon. I was as corny as Kansas in orbit.
I wasn’t thinking very well at all.
15
CLICK!
Zap!
“Good morning, Mister Spy. Do you wish to talk now?”
It was over. Finished. Dead. Ktch’d turned my torture off, plunging me with a morbid Click! from breathless peaks of subjective ecstasy to Wednesday morning. Wow, what a bringdown.
“Mister Spy?”
The lobsters were at it again, all twelve of them — a ghastly sight — scuttling here and there about the loft with fifty-gallon steel drums in their claws; all but Ktch, who was standing still with one pincer resting on the largest torture device and both eyestalks pointed at me. These were the kind of lobsters that liked to gossip while they worked, too — the worst kind of lobster — and the loft sounded like a firing range at rush hour. I hate loud noises in the morning.
“Can you hear me, Mister Spy? Are you all right?”
And this morning I was ready to hate almost everything. I was still drenched with metabolized coffee, for one thing, clammy and reeking. And I still hadn’t had yesterday’s lunch yet, not to mention supper, snack, and breakfast. The inside of my mouth felt like it was digesting itself, and tasted like it, too.
“You’re not — oh my — you’re not Dead, are you? Tell me you’re not dead!”
And I hadn’t slept, either. That was another thing. All-night torture sessions are fine and groovy if you dig that sort of thing, but I’m a cat who needs his sleep.
Furthermore, Michael hadn’t rescued me — first time he’d failed me in three and a half years. The world was still unsaved. These filthy lobsters’ evil plans were still intact, unfoiled. Everything had gone wrong. Everything.
Oh, but I was in a foul mood that morning.
“Oh dear! Speak to me, Spy. Dear Spy, please say something!”
Ktch was turning pale again. That seemed to be a habit of his, and I was sick of it. His feelers were flailing weakly about in the air, his eyestalks were wilting, and he was rubbing his claws together in brittle, nervous polyryhthms: crustacean symptoms of acute distress. I was pretty sick of that, too.
“Oh, Spy,” he wailed, “please, Please do not be dead!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I comforted him. “Will you shut up!”
“Oh my!” He sank to the floor and trembled noisily.
“Stop that!” I yelled. “Cut it out!” I hate to yell in the morning. “Stop that flipping noise, God damn you! Quit it!”
Which attracted the rest of the lobsters. They lay down their burdens and gathered in a clackety cobalt-blue cluster around me. This was a little quieter, but Ktch was still trembling briskly, and the sight of twenty-two extended eyestalks waving in my direction made me nervous.
“Stop that!” And I was developing a sore throat, too. “Stop!”
They didn’t seem to understand English, but the idea got across. They muffled their noise to a spring-rain patter that was merely aggravating, and retracted their eyes. Ktch, however, continued to clatter on the floor. It was shameful to see a grown lobster carry on so.
“You,” I said quite softly, blending laryngitis with intense menace.
Ktch froze in midclatter.
“You,” I repeated. “Stand up. Quietly.”
He stood up. Shakily. Every time his shell clicked, he winced, producing another click. His feelers dangled limply down on either side of him, his eyestalks drooped, and his claws just missed dragging on the floor. For a six-foot lobster, he was a sorry spectacle.
“Spy?” he begged.
“Shut up. I want to think.”
Now that I had them quiet, my temper wasn’t half as foul as it had been, but I was still uncomfortable enough to generate a decent rage if I needed one. To prove it, I glowered fiercely at my dozen lobsters. It isn’t easy for a face as bland as mine to glower convincingly, but I managed. Twenty-four limp feelers drooped like a grove of segmented willows.
“That’s better.” Still menacing. Not a carapace creaked.
It was clear that Michael was not going to rescue me. I had some things to say about that, but they could wait till I saw him again, if ever. Right now the problem was to rescue myself, a task for which I was eminently unsuited.
But maybe I had a chance. Look how I’d managed to cow these twelve strapping lobsters with naught but a yell and a glower. Consider yesterday’s interrogation scene with Ktch. Right. These bugs had chinks in their armor big enough to drive a seafood truck through: several helpful weaknesses I already knew about, doubtless many more to be discovered.
Their biggest weakness was this nonviolent nonsense. They’d sure as hell picked the wrong planet for that game. Human beings are just naturally violent animals, even the nonviolent ones. Hell, even the limp protesters who lie down in front of ammunition trucks and have to be hauled off the street like sacks of flour, all they’re doing is imposing their will on others, compelling other people to behave contrary to their own desires, which is the crystalline essence of violence. And the rest of us tend to be downright brutaclass="underline" we spank our kids, we step on bugs, we fish and hunt for pleasure, we enjoy 3V bloodshed, we play football and other battle games — we’re a rough bunch, we are.
I didn’t think the lobsters really understood this yet.
And old Ktch here couldn’t even think about violence without turning pale. Groovy. If I didn’t get anything else accomplished, I intended to see just how pale he could get. I was fairly confident I could persuade him that he was personally and directly responsible for every act of violence caused by the Reality Pill, I was looking forward to that.
“Click.”
“Who did that?” Twelve lobsters faded. “Don’t do it again.”
I’d also like, I decided, to see friend Ktch’s reaction to a seafood restaurant. A lobster house, for instance.