Venus Trap
by Robert Silverberg
They brought it to me, of course. I’m the head of this outfit, since they have the idea I’m a diplomat, and so they brought it to me.
It started in my office; I’m the Terran attaché to the Venusian Embassy in New York—the catch being that the Venusians don’t know that a fellow named Mart Robinson is attached to them.
My job, mostly, is simply to sit around and keep an eye on our blue-skinned brothers from space, and make sure they’re only double-crossing us and not pulling a triple cross. Which, knowing them, I consider altogether likely at any time.
The Venusian Embassy is a tall, imposing building in midtown Manhattan. It looks just like every other office building in the midtown section. The only difference is that you can get inside any of the other office buildings without much trouble. No Earthman has entered the Venusian Embassy since the day the Treaty was signed, and the windows are pleasantly opaque.
No Earthman except one, that is. His name was Hilary Bowie, and he was a short, sad-looking, washed-out little fellow with an uncommon faculty for getting into places he wasn’t expected to get into. He, and he alone, was my pipeline into the Venusian Embassy.
He walked into my office, carrying a fairly large, ominous-looking wooden box, and having a hard time of it. He sat it down in front of me, and let me contemplate it unopened for a couple of minutes. “A present for Daddy,” he said. He smiled. Somehow Hilary Bowie’s smile has a way of making me feel even gloomier.
I looked at the box. It was about two feet long, about the same high, and had airholes punched in it. “You bring me a pet?”
Hilary nodded. “A cute one,” he said. “Real cute.” He tapped the box, and I heard an unpleasant scrabbling sound come from within. It sounded like an army of crabs.
“Cut the suspense,” I told him. “I’m busy, Hilary. There’s a new Treaty revision coming up next month and I have to—”
“Sure,” Hilary said, and he smiled again. He’s got a smile that makes a person feel like crying. “But you’re going to have to write a different kind of treaty when you see what I’ve got here.” He shivered. “Now that I look back, I don’t see how I got the thing out of the building.”
But now I was starting to get impatient, but I didn’t dare open the box. “Go ahead,” I urged. “Show the damned thing to me, will you?”
“Get me a bird cage,” he said blandly.
“What?”
“All right, so don’t get me a bird cage.” He reached for the lid of the box.
“Hold it,” I said nervously. I flipped on my intercom, with none too steady fingers.
“Cindy? I want a bird cage, on the double. About two feet high, and I want it here in five minutes, if not sooner. That’s all.”
“Yes, Mr. Robinson,” she said, sounding more than a little puzzled. I could imagine some vivid cursing going on in the outer office, but I knew she’d get the bird cage.
And sure enough, she did. That’s what I like so much about this job: when I say something, they hop. She walked into my office about three minutes later, clutching a great big gleaming bird cage in her lovely milk-white hand.
“Here you are, sir,” she said coolly, as if digging up bird cages on a moment’s notice were part of her everyday routine.
“Good girl. Just put it on the desk.” She looked queerly at Hilary’s canon for a moment and left. As she went out she shrugged her shoulders, making sure I caught the gesture. Hilary has never impressed the rest of my staff much, but he’s worth his weight in plutonium to me.
“There’s your bird cage,” I said. “Now show me.” I glanced at my watch. Hilary had used up fifteen minutes of valuable time, and I had sixty-two different projects on the line with the brass upstairs breathing on my neck about all of them.
“Here you are, Mart. A little bit of poultry I picked up while visiting the Embassy this morning. As far as I know, they haven’t missed it yet.”
He leaned the box up near the open door of the bird cage and gingerly slid the lid off. There was a flutter of snow-white wings, and then I heard the door of the bird cage clang shut in a hurry.
I stared at the creature inside. A good ten seconds passed, and I just stared.
“All right, Hilary. You’ve hit the jackpot. What is it?”
“Can’t you tell, Mark? It’s plain as day, of course. It’s a pigeon.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “A pigeon! I should have seen it immediately, beyond any doubt. But,” I asked, “where’d it get that extra head? And what about those talons?”
“That’s your problem, my friend,” Hilary said. It sure was. I stared glumly at the weird-looking thing in the bird cage.
Underneath it all, I could see now, there was a pigeon—an ordinary, perfectly conventional, harmless little fan-tail. But someone or something had redesigned this pigeon drastically.
Each of its two heads ended in a razor-sharp beak. Its legs were sturdy things tipped with claws like steel knives. Its four eyes were beady, bright, and, I thought, unnaturally intelligent. This particular pigeon had been converted into a pretty deadly sort of fighting machine. I gestured out the window at the gleaming, opaque-windowed, unapproachable Venusian Embassy.
“I suppose you got this little pet over there?”
“I did,” Hilary said. “I found him in a laboratory on—let me see—the forty-second floor. No, the forty-third. It was the devil’s own job getting him out, too, but I figured you’d like to have a look.
There were some other cuties in there too. A six-legged cat, a dog with three heads—an honest-to-God Cerberus—another cat with the damnedest mouthful of teeth you’d want to see, each one about six inches long and sharp as needles. They have a whole laboratory, filled with these pretty beasts.”
“Each one having the basic form of some common Terran animal,” I said.
“Right. They’ve taken our animals and built them into things like this.” He pointed to the bird cage. Just then the intercom buzzed.
“What is it, Cindy?”
“Mr. Garvey to see you, sir.”
I frowned. Garvey was a scientist in government service. He also happened to be my sister’s husband, and he felt that gave him some claim on my time. He had made a habit of dropping in on me every time he had some hair-brained project that he thought could use my political influence.
“Tell him I’m in conference, Cindy,” I said, watching the ex-pigeon making ferocious attempts to escape its cage and start slicing us up. “Tell him I can see him in a while, and he can wait if he’s in no hurry.”
“Yes, Mr. Robinson.”
I turned back to Bowie. “Look, Hilary. You say the Venusians are playing around with Earth animals?”
“That’s my guess, Mart. You know how shrewd they are at genetics. I guess this represents one of their little experiments.”
“You don’t have any notion why they’re doing this?” I asked.
“Not the slightest,” Hilary said. “For the sheer love of pure science, I suppose. Doesn’t that sound likely?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Real likely.”
I got up and walked to the window and stared out. My office faced the Embassy Building, and that gave me ample opportunity to spend long hours staring out, wondering what the hell was going on behind its opaque windows.
Earth had been on more-or-less friendly terms with Venus for nearly fifteen years, which meant we had an Embassy up there and they had one down here, and that was the size of it. It was an uneasy sort of friendship, with not much warmth about it. We were both somewhat scared—hell, scared stiff—of the Martian Combine, and the Earth-Venus alliance was one of pure convenience. Though we didn’t admit it publicly, of course.