It was getting dark, but I could see the place he meant ahead of us: a low beach leading into a willow-choked ravine.
Then, “Michael?” a bassoon implored. Andrew Blake had joined us.
“Yes, Andy?”
“We’re nearly there.”
“Right.”
“Yes. I’ve been wondering.”
“What about?” Mike reduced speed. The bus crawled toward the hostile beach.
“We’re planning to, ah, Fight these creatures. Right?”
“Right.”
“Yes. But how? We don’t even have a gun.” It was nice to see somebody else worrying about that.
“Don’t need guns, believe me. We’ve got the perfect weapon, Andy. Just relax.”
“What weapon?” We were getting closer to the shore. It looked deserted.
“Why am I the only person who can think around here?” Mike snapped. Andy recoiled in alarm. “Think, Andy, think! We already have the perfect weapon. You’ve seen it yourself. Now just think about it.”
The odds were 49 to 51 that Michael’s perfect weapon was essentially bull, quite unbeknownst to him, of course, but it was worth thinking about. I’d rather think about that than the withering tide of alien annihilation I expected to stream out at us from under those suspiciously innocent-looking willows. The perfect… Oh.
Andy had it, too, and stuck an index finger up to mark it “Of course!” he said in wonder. “Of course!”
“Sure,” I ratified. “The bus.”
“What else?”
What else indeed? The bus could go almost everywhere, over almost any obstacle, and its down blast was strong enough to turn even the biggest lobster into sky-blue library paste. But somehow I couldn’t feel as certain about it as Michael felt. A weapon, yes. Even a good weapon, yes. But perfect? Or even very good? I didn’t know yet what they were, but I knew in my bones there were serious flaws to Michael’s perfect weapon. At least one of these was that we didn’t know what kind of weapons the lobsters were likely to use.
Besides, I’m just not built to put much trust in perfect anythings. The word perfect seems to turn me off somehow.
We were now just a few yards offshore, cruising slowly back and forth parallel to the beach. The whole scene still looked thoroughly deserted, and I entertained the possibility of Michael’s having goofed.
The MacDougal Street Commandos had deserted their seats to bunch up at the shoreward windows, stampeding from one side to the other every time Mike turned the bus around. This complicated driving considerably, but Mike didn’t say anything about it. Most unusual for him.
“I don’t see nothing,” from Gary the Frog. “You see anything, Harry?”
“Not a thing, sugar lump.” God in heaven!
“Me too,” says Brother Gerstein. All the rest chimed in.
Now that we were actually there, I found myself feeling uncomfortable in a different, more practical way. The trouble was, I couldn’t hear anything. Nothing important, anyhow. Thanks to my absurd myopia (20-300), I’ve never been much of a visual cat. In fact, I’m more of an ear man, which is convenient, since I hear better than just about everyone I’ve ever met. But now my hearing was being sorely handicapped.
In our present situation, with night coming on strong and all, straining my eyes to see a hypothetical blue lobster in an almost black shadow didn’t make much sense, but if I’d been able to hear properly, I’d’ve known in a minute if the lobsters were out there, and if they were, exactly where they were hiding. A muffled claw click, willow leaves brushing against a carapace — such tiny, all but inaudible noises would’ve told me all I needed to know.
But I couldn’t hear. The mingled roars of the bus’s props and engines drowned out everything but fairly loud talk inside the cabin. Right. So much for perfect weapons.
And it was now quite dark. Mike switched on the headlights and the movable high-powered spotlights and. lashed the beach with strands of brightness. Still nothing to be seen.
“Hey, baby” — Little Micky speaking for the first time since Times Square — “we got, like, the wrong address. You dig? We…”
He froze with his eyes opened wider than his mouth, staring out the window behind me and beginning to shake just a little bit. As I was turning around, one of the girls — don’t know which one — issued a staccato shriek that was a good bit more convincing than the customary sostenuto job. Someone else, also unidentified, keeled over with a sonorous thump.
Now I could see it, too, standing gold and scarlet there in unearthly power and brute splendor on the beach that just a clock-tick back was utterly deserted.
It was roughly twelve feet tall, essentially saurian, overwhelmingly carnivorous. But it had three toothy heads, all evil, each on its own long, muscular, sinuous neck, and at least six limbs — two big ones at the bottom, two slimmer but incredibly powerful-looking ones at the bottom of its rib cage if it had one, and two small and maybe not very strong short ones at the top, all ending in unusually large numbers of long, battle-sharp talons. It looked like a red Tyrannosaurus rex with lots of optional equipment.
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why and how it had three heads. I should think one would suffice, and be a full day’s work to manage, too. But what kind of environment would favor multiple heads? None I’d willingly imagine.
With a liquid, terrifying motion, the beast aimed two of those heads at us. The third, held high, slowly turned from side to side, ignoring us completely. So: a built-in sentry.
One of the heads roared at us. Then another one joined in, not on the same pitch but a pretty good fifth above. The two roars merged in a sub bass sonority that shook our bones. Then the third head joined the chorus and I fell down and blacked out. There are some disadvantages to being an ear man.
When I came to, we were cruising thirty yards offshore. The thing was gone.
“Don’ know where he went to, baby,” Little Micky reported. “He just jumped straight up and forgot about the comedown, dig it, man?”
Despite the air conditioning, the bus was growing warm. The beast’s triple roar had powdered our windows.
Sandi and Harriet had fainted and were still out of it. Sativa was wandering blankly, saying, “Ohh.” I wondered if she’d had second thoughts about her daily karma.
Gary the inevitable Frog seemed to have vanished. For a wild instant I thought he’d been devoured, and then I remembered where, knowing Gary, he must be. Sure enough, when I opened the toilet door, there he was, in a sadly unaesthetic condition from having reached the john an inch too late but otherwise undamaged.
Leo was hovering over Sandi, somehow clucking but unharmed. Andrew Blake was muttering to himself, or maybe God, or both, in execrable Latin. Karen was holding his hand. Apparently she hadn’t fainted. Very odd.
Pat and Stu were as excited as kids at an earthquake and kept asking one another, “Did you see it, man? Did you really see it?” Kevin was serenely manufacturing quaint theories to explain the thing. Little Micky was at a window, waiting for the next event.
Everyone was basically all right, so I went forward to confer with Mike.
“Perfect weapon, Mike?” I teased unfairly.
“Hey, I thought you said these lobster men were nonviolent.”
“They are. But they don’t object to anything else’s being violent, if that’s its nature. And if something like that triple dinosaur happens to get violent at us, well, that’s our affair — and the dinosaur’s — and doesn’t concern Ktch and company at all. That’s how they explain it, anyhow.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t think they meant to let that creature hurt us any. You noticed that they got rid of it the instant it jumped. They just wanted to scare us, that’s all.”