Lady Slings the Booze

by Spider Robinson

  “Step into my office, dear boy,” she said, and led me down the hall to that very place.

  The most extraordinary thing about it was that I could see nothing extraordinary about it. An office. Desk. Typewriter. Bric-a-brac. Bookshelves. Couch, chairs, assorted flat surfaces. This, the inner sanctum of the strangest woman I had ever met, could have been the office of any madam. Or for that matter, a stockbroker.

  I wouldn’t have cared if it made Tesla’s lab look ordinary. As I took a chair, my head was spinning. Too much had happened to me in too few days. In too few hours! I was on a huge emotional roller coaster…and the moment I’d dismissed my troops, I’d felt it start the downhill ride.

  “WHAT is it, Joe?”

  I bit my lip and stared at the floor.

  She gave me a minute. Maybe two. When she did speak, her voice had softened, lost its whiskey rasp and a good deal of its British accent. “What’s wrong?”

  “Lady,” I said slowly, “I couldn’t say anything in front of the others. But I’m telling you now, officially, that I think you should assume command of this show. Or Mike, if you don’t want the job.”

  “Good Lord, why?” she asked, genuinely startled. “You’ve already done most of the work. Except for the worrying—and I’ll be doing that too, if it’s any comfort to you. We all will.”

  “I know that,” I said irritably. “I’m not trying to duck the worry. I don’t care about the worry. It’s the responsibility. Just that, the nominal responsibility.”

  “I’m not sure I grasp the distinction,” she said slowly.

  “Remember a few minutes back, when I was describing our assets in morale-building detail for the troops? We’re just this side of immortal and invulnerable, we’ve got the greatest genius in the history of the world spotting for us, we’re packing death rays and magic specs, and we’ve got a talking dog. A ‘boat-race,’ the Professor called it. What could possibly go wrong?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Do you by any chance recall the last boat-race you and I bet on together? Just a few days ago, in the Reception area? Did we or did we not have Christian Raffalli nailed down just as tight as this? No, tighter, by God: we knew what he looked like, and which door he’d come in, and it went down on our own turf.” I heard my own voice rising in pitch and volume.

  “What is it you’re afraid of, Joe?” she asked.

  “God damn it, you’ve seen it in operation! The famous Quigley Jinx! It came within a highly fractionated second of getting us all killed—and turning me into a soprano.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Lady Sally barked.

  “The hero you’ve selected had to have the heroine and a muscular ingenue literally save his nuts for him the last time out.”

  “You don’t want me,” she said witheringly. “I’ll give you a chit to see Father Newman.”

  “Will you listen to me? This isn’t a male pride thing, it’s not a question of my morale. I can deal with women saving my bacon; that’s been permissible in detective stories for years now. I can live with the absolute certainty that I’m going to come out of this looking like a fool; I got used to that a long time ago—”

  “Joe, for God’s sake, the dice have no memory—”

  “You haven’t got the right to say that to a man who’s been rolling sevens for thirty years straight! I’ll withdraw my request if you can answer one question. Take your time: can you conceive of any way this operation could go a little bit wrong?”

  She started to answer…and stopped with her mouth open.

  “The way I see it, it’s total success or total failure. I haven’t had all that many total failures in my life. But I’ve never had a total success.”

  “Oh.”

  Those binocular lenses were making my eyes sting. “Lady, I’m not a wimp. I can live with failure. The proof is that I’m not dead yet.” Bullshit, lenses, I was crying. “But I can’t live with this failure! Not on my wedding night! Even if there’s no history to go down in for it, I don’t want to be the guy who literally fucked up everything!” I remembered the last time I had cried, the night my mother died, and lost it completely.

  Lady Sally gathered me into her arms and onto her lap as if I weighed no more than a child, and let me cry it out against her throat. She stroked my hair and said soothing things, not to make me stop crying but to make the flow emerge easier.

  After a long time I became aware that she was speaking to me. “Can you hear me, Humphrey?”

  “Snuff.”

  “You survived Raffalli. Didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. But—”

  “Here: blow. In fact, that whole caper was a success for you. Things went wrong…but for the first time, nothing went irrevocably wrong, did it?”

  “Huh,” I said. My breathing was under control now. “Actually, you’re right. I wonder why not.”

  “Humphrey Joseph Kenneth,” she said fondly, “I love you—but sometimes you are an awful chump.”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s overlook the fact that whoever leads this expedition is going to have to cope with your alleged jinx, and you have the most experience. Apropos of nothing, how many children do you think could have survived being brought up by people as crazy as Arethusa’s parents?”

  It was a curious digression—but I’d been thinking about those two birds a lot the past few days, in between the cracks, trying to figure out whether I was angry at them or not. “That’s right,” I agreed, “she was very lu…”

  Pause.

  “Ah, you’re beginning to see it at last,” Lady Sally said. “How many whorehouses would you say feature really good piano in the parlor any more these days? How many places are there where Arethusa could practice both her arts, within the same building? And how many of those would you estimate are run by madams broadminded enough to deal with a single broad who has two telepathic bodies—on her terms?”

  I sat up and knuckled my eyes. “Jesus—”

  “That she stumbled across this place, the perfect home for her, is a miracle. That she should find her True Love here, the week before Armageddon, is good fortune beggaring the imagination. Face it, Joe: Arethusa is Luck on four lovely legs.”

  “Holy shit—” The world tilted on its axis.

  “And now she is your luck. And the evidence suggests it’s just enough to keep your balls out of trouble. As with all good marriages: between you, you seem to make up a more or less normal human being.”

  I could barely believe what I was about to say, but the words came out in spite of me. “Do you mean to stand there with your bare face hanging out and tell me that the reason a nice girl like her is working in a place like this—”

  And she grinned broadly and gave the classic punchline:

  “Just lucky, I guess…”

  15. Miner Disturbance

  “…hanging by my fingertips from the rim of my own anus, to keep from falling out…”

  DAVID SPIWACK, in conversation

  “PRIS, this is the first chance I’ve had to thank you for coring Raffalli’s head. You saved my testicles, not to mention my life.”

  “Yeah, I know, that’s been bothering me,” she said soberly. “I’m sorry, Ken: I did try to come take you off the hook a couple of times since then. But whenever you were awake, I was on duty. You’re welcome, okay? You can save my life some day if you want.”

  I stared at her. She had been concerned that in saving my life, she had placed me under onerous obligation. “I’ll do that. If it ever needs saving. I don’t think I’ll hold my breath, though. You know, all this aside…I like you, Priscilla.”

  “I like you too,” she said. “You risked everything to help the Lady. And you’re going to do it again. If we live through this, what do you say we get drunk together some night?”

  “That’ll be fun,” I said, and meant it. I don’t know, maybe I’d learned something from Arethusa about relating to someone physically stronger than me. Pris didn’t i
ntimidate me any more.

  We were in Lady Sally’s office, preparing to ship out—although just exactly how, I didn’t have a clue. Me, Priscilla, one Arethusa—the other was upstairs, under mild sedation, so I could have her full attention—and Ralph Von Wau Wau. We were all gathered around the Lady’s desk, staring at the best map we had of the route from the bowels of Penn Station to the manhole that gave access to a maintenance chamber surrounding the water main. (I do not intend to be more specific than that. If you want to look for it yourself, feel free. But remember that there are a lot of people prowling around Penn Station…and the attrition rate is high.)

  It was actually a damn good map. I’d be surprised if the City Engineer had one as good. Tesla said it was a printout from his computer, but I think he was pulling my leg: it looked like real printing to me. He claimed it was done with a laser beam, which is ridiculous. However he got it, it showed the salient features of the terrain we were headed for.

  “I think you should arrive here,” Lady Sally said, pointing to a spot on the map.

  “Why there?” I asked.

  “For all we know, The Miner—or minor Miner, but let’s call him that until we know better—The Miner may very well be looking over that bomb right now, as we speak. This spot is midway between said bomb and the point at which one leaves Penn Station proper to approach it. A person standing right here cannot be seen either from the bomb chamber or from the Station. If he’s passing that spot as you arrive, you have him; if he’s approaching it, you have time to hide and jump him; if he’s already at the bomb, he has to come to you, like it or not. We can’t lose.”

  “The hell we can’t,” I said. “We’ve agreed to assume that this guy isn’t a moron, right? So if he’s even as smart as me, he’ll have the whole approach wired some way. Electric eye, heat sensor, motion sensor, something. Especially along that corridor.”

  “Ah,” she said, “but he shan’t be as smart as I, who have procured from Nikola Tesla this magic talisman.” She handed me a little widget that looked like a transistor radio someone left on a stove. “All three of the devices of which you speak, and cameras and acoustic listening devices as well, will cause this light here to glow—even if they’re on the other side of several inches of steel or cement. Push this button, and the Talisman ruins them.”

  I frowned at it. Combat is a lousy place to test new technology. “Does Tesla guarantee it’ll do it faster than they can get off a signal?”

  Her turn to frown. “Well, Nikky says he thinks so.”

  I shook my head. “That tears it. If there’s going to be even a momentary alarm, I want it to come from the bomb chamber, where The Miner already knows there’s some sort of electrical malfunction. I don’t want him thinking about anybody coming along that approach. We arrive in the bomb chamber, and use Tesla’s Talisman on the approach corridor from there, through the manhole cover. Then Pris, Arethusa and Ralph work their way back out from there, very cautiously, waving the Talisman before them as they go.”

  Do you have any idea how few people stop arguing instantly just because they realize they’re wrong? “Right you are: the bomb room it is.” She squinted at the map, reached into a desk drawer, and twiddled something out of sight. “You’ll arrive on the far side of the pipe, facing across it at the bomb access area and the exit ladder to the manhole. It’s a bloody big pipe, but there should be plenty of clearance above and below it. Whenever you say.”

  I looked around at my companions. Alert intelligent faces looked back at me, every commanding officer’s dream, far more precious than invulnerable armor or handheld death rays. Arethusa’s face actually seemed to hold twice as much personality as usual, although that was probably just power of suggestion. “I guess we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. About this ‘arriving’ stuff…just how is that done, exactly?”

  She closed the drawer, locked it, and stood up. “Ken Taggart, my new friend and champion, do you trust me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation.

  She went to a big floor-to-ceiling bookcase that covered an entire wall. She selected a big reference book, pulled it halfway from the shelf. The whole bookcase slid smoothly down into the floor, with just the faintest whisper of sound, exposing the bare wall.

  “Walk through that wall,” Lady Sally said. “And step to the left on the far side.”

  I counted to five, sighed, and walked through the wall.

  IT was the eeriest thing I’ve ever done. It looked exactly like a solid wall, right down to the dust highlighting the painter’s brushmarks—even as my nose was entering it, my eyes were trying to tell me that it was a solid wall. I tried to keep my eyes open, but I couldn’t manage it; the flinch was quite involuntary. There was absolutely no sensation of penetration or transition; that wall was as substantial as a campaign promise.

  On the other side of it was pitch-blackness that smelled like a bathtub drain.

  Of course I should have been expecting darkness. You don’t leave a night light on by your clandestine nuclear weapon. In fact, dammit, I was expecting it, that was why I had a flashlight clipped to my belt. I just hadn’t remembered that I was expecting it…

  I stopped short, and as I was groping for the flashlight I recalled that Lady Sally had said to step to the left. I’ve always hated imbeciles who stop just inside a door myself. I stepped to the left, got the flashlight loose, tripped over something low and angular and stubborn. I went down heavily, felt the flashlight go ballistic, whanged my head painlessly against something that felt remarkably like a crowbar, and landed in a heap, smacking my head again on clammy concrete floor.

  The flashlight snapped on when it landed. It bounced crazily, came down upright, spun like a top for a while like a little emergency light, and came to rest, pointing at the floor. Try and do that. It didn’t even break. But the total illumination approximated that of a fading match at five yards. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Perversely, I was quite irritated that the double impact had not hurt my head at all. I deserved a headache…

  Much too close to me, something made a sound, and I knew that sound. I smelled the faintest trace of something, and I knew that smell. I remained perfectly still, holding my breath, until I was nearly out of air, and then I opened my eyes again.

  If the ghostly circle of glow from the flashlight was a distant match, then these were no more than the ember at the tip of a match that has just gone out. Two of them. Side by side.

  I did not scream, because I knew that Arethusa would be the second one through that wall, any second now. But I really hate rats.

  Sure, everybody hates rats. But I got a rat story I’m not even going to tell you. Let it stand that I really hate rats.

  Especially rats out of whom I have just literally scared the living shit. I could discern just enough of his silhouette to see that he was paralyzed with fear. At least he wasn’t cornered. But he was frozen between fight and flight, and he had to decide soon. My stomach suggested a good trick, a very old reflex, but I did not want the Miner to know something was wrong the instant he cracked the lid to this chamber.

  Instead I growled. Loud, and as evil as I was scared, a horrid sound distilled from two million years of successful primate bluff.

  Ralph Von Wau Wau couldn’t have done better. Templeton remembered a previous engagement and bugged out. I found it oddly hard to stop growling, but I managed just as Arethusa arrived. She had her flashlight on, of course.

  “Is everything okay, Joe?”

  “Ginger peachy,” I said tightly. “I’m just having a bit of a lie-down. And dammit, I’m ‘Ken’ while we’re on this caper, okay? Most of the troops know me by that name, and there’s no sense confusing things any more than they already are.”

  “Yes, Ken.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t your head I meant to bite off.” I was still trembling slightly with reaction, and I wished she’d aim her flashlight somewhere else.

  I got to my feet, reclaimed my own f
lash, noted that I had tripped over a large plumber’s toolbox and that the “crowbar” was a bracing bar for one of the big cement trusses that supported the huge water main. Logical things to expect and be looking out for if you were going to wander around a place like this in the dark.

  Arethusa reached a hand back through the solid concrete wall of the chamber and pulled Priscilla through. I wished I’d been bright enough to do that for her. They stepped to the right together and Ralph emerged into the pool of light from their flashlights. His eyes were slits, his ears up, his nostrils wide. “Ratzhit!” he growled at once.

  “What’s the matter?” Pris asked.

  “Ratzhit, I set. Fresh.”

  “He’s gone,” I said wearily. “I chased him away.”

  Ralph’s slit eyes opened to as wide as they could go. “You chased avay a Manhattan tunnel wrat?” he said slowly. His nostrils wrinkled. “You mate him zhit himzelf?”

  “I growled at him,” I said.

  Ralph stared. “You…gwowled at him. Ant he zhit himzelf.” He dropped his eyes, his ears flattened, and he stepped back a pace.

  Well, I had succeeded in winning Ralph’s respect, anyway. And the rat’s too, come to think of it. I started to feel better. Time to get this show on the road.

  “Okay, who’s got Tesla’s bug-hunter?”

  “You do, Ken,” Arethusa said.

  IT was in my shirt pocket, where I had stashed it without thinking. Fortunately, when I took it out it was not glowing. “Right,” I said. “Pris, Arethusa, stay here and douse your lights. Ralph, come with me.”

  The pipe was about six feet in diameter, and there were about three feet of clearance above and below it. The rectangular chamber ended in a featureless bulkhead in either direction, and enclosed perhaps fifty feet of pipe, supported by two massive trusses. I picked a spot on the far side of one of the trusses. I was glad that it was dusty in that chamber, it meant that there was air circulation, but I got even dirtier than I was already by the time I came out from under that pipe on the other side. It reminded me that I had fetched a drop cloth for this purpose. Ralph, of course, had no trouble. Dogs usually excel in Limbo contests.