STRANGE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OMNIBUS

by Benson Grayson

  PUTIN’S FLEA

  Russian President Vladimir Putin was not a happy man. It is true that he held in his own hands more power than that exercised by the Tsars in the last years of the Romanov dynasty. It is also true that not only did he control vast resources as president, but he could obtain as much more as he might desire by applying pressure to the oligarchs who dominate the Russian economy. And of course the Russian Federal Security Service, the domestic replacement for the former KGB, could be counted upon to eliminate ny opponents he could not intimidate or bribe.

  Still he had his problems, he was well aware that if too many of the oligarchs combined against him, he might have difficulty in prevailing over them. Similarly, he also had to carefully monitor the personnel of the internal security apparatus to ensure they remained completely trustworthy. He even had to consider somewhat the attitude of the West, since access to Western markets and capital made it easier for him to expand the Russian economy, and strengthen his popular support. But the thing that troubled him most was the lack of anyone he could completely trust.

  Musing on this problem one day, the Russian President recalled something he had seen in a recent Hollywood movie about Washington politics. One of the characters had said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Putin suddenly realized this was the solution to his problem, he would get a dog. As president, he had no difficulty in implementing this decision immediately. One of his aides brought in several suitable candidates for the position of presidential dog, and Putin chose one, a Russian wolfhound, whom he called Pushkin, after his favorite Russian author.

  Pushkin quickly came to occupy an important place in Putin’s affections. The dog was given his own bathroom in the Kremlin next to Putin’s office. He slept on Putin’s bed at night, sat at his feet at the dinner table, and traveled with Putin in his limousine each morning from Putin’s residence to the Kremlin. His diet consisted of prime quality steaks accompanied by such tidbits from Putin’s dinner table Pushkin chose to consume.

  As he sat at his desk studying state documents sent to him, trying to decide which policy option would be the most effective; Putin occasionally would talk to himself. One day as he did so, Pushkin looked up at him and began barking loudly. Putin was shocked; this was not typical of the dog’s behavior. Then it dawned on him. Pushkin was laboriously trying to communicate with him via Morse code. Putin grabbed a pad and .transcribed the dog’s comments. He realized Pushkin was giving him advice in response to the problem the president had raised while talking to himself.

  Putin looked at Pushkin’s words and decided that the dog had given him sound advice. He followed it and everything went perfectly. Naturally, the Russian President began to discuss all his problems with Pushkin and follow the dog’s guidance. Since he was completely sure of Pushkin’s loyalty and intelligence, there was no reason to do otherwise. Naturally, it was too unwieldy to have lengthy discussions concerning complex matters with Pushkin via Morse code. Putin devised a system to phrase his side of the discussion with the dog as simple yes or no questions which Pushkin could answer briefly with one bark for yes and two for no. Everything went well.

  Then one day everything changed. Putin asked his canine advisor the best tactic to use in dealing with a planned opposition political demonstration against his holding another term as president. The dog barked once and Putin therefore ordered the internal security service to crush the planned rally. This decision proved to be most unfortunate. Many of the demonstrators were injured and a few killed as a result of the heavy handed tactics employed by the Federal Security Service. A storm of criticism of Putin and of the Russian government erupted around the world, and the Western nations were provoked enough to temporarily impose measures which slightly reduced the profits of the major Russian corporations.

  Putin shrugged his shoulders over the incident. His faith in Pushkin’s advice was not in the least diminished and he continued to depend on his policy recommendations. A few days later, the situation was repeated. Pushkin’s suggestions as to the proper course to follow in dealing with a major American petroleum corporation also turned out to be wrong. Did this weaken Putin’s dependence on the dog for advice? Not in the least.

  Although Putin entertained no concern over these events, the same could not be said for the Federal Security Service. Its chiefs knew they were in bed with Putin. If his increasing number of policy failures caused a lack of popular backing for the Russian President, it could reach a point where he would be ousted. And if Putin were forced from power, he might be replaced by a ruler who would reorganize the internal security apparatus and remove the current leadership. Naturally, this was a calamity to be avoided at all costs.

  The internal security apparatus secretly began a detailed surveillance of Putin and of Pushkin. After some time, its officers discovered the problem. Pushkin had a flea. When the flea bit him, Pushkin became distracted and devoted all his attention to removing it from his tender parts. At such moments, Pushkin could not give the necessary attention to what Putin was telling him. If the Russian President was unfortunate enough in his timing to pose a question while the dog was scratching, he would give the first answer that popped into his mind, usually one bark for yes.

  Having ascertained the problem, the internal security chiefs had to come up with the proper solution to this delicate problem. They knew that it would be too hazardous to discuss it openly with the Russian leader. Therefore, they summoned the best field operatives from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, their old colleagues from the days before the Soviet KGB was dissolved. The elite officers selected for this activity were the Foreign Intelligence Service chiefs in Washington, London, Bonn and, Beijing. The four officers flew to Moscow to discuss and jointly come up with a solution.

  The four went over the delicate problem, but could not arrive at a common solution. Some favored assassinating the dog, others assassinating the flea. They even brought in from Bulgaria a top agent they had employed to kill some political figures with an implement camouflaged as an umbrella, whose tip injected a poison which left no discernible trace in the victim.

  As it happened, while the discussions were under way, the Foreign Intelligence Service chief in Malta, who had been back in Moscow on vacation, happened to pass by the room and overheard the discussions. He was a relatively junior official and did not have much of a reputation with the senior security officials. But he was extremely clever.

  The Malta chief knocked at the door and entered before he could be ordered to keep out. “Comrades,” he said, as he had been taught to call his superiors during the Soviet era, “I could not help but overhear your problem and I have the perfect solution.”

  “What is it?” they cried in unison, forgetting this breach of protocol in a desire to have the answer to their dilemma.

  “It’s simple,” came back the reply. “Don’t assassinate the flea. Turn him into a double agent. We keep him in place and feed him the answers to give to Putin. Not only do we prevent Putin from getting the wrong advice, we give him the answers that are best for us.”

  “That’s a fine idea,” said the chief from Washington. “But how do you recruit a flea?”

  “Aha,” came back the answer from the Malta chief, who had not the least idea. . “I certainly can’t reveal to you the tactics I’ve employed with so much success in Malta to secure excellent flea agents. It would violate all of the basic security rules. And you comrades have no need to know.”

  The four chiefs had to agree with this statement. They gave the Malta chief a week to handle the problem. They didn’t have to spell out the details about what would befall him if he failed: not only he, but his entire family and all of his friends and neighbors would be sent to work in the Siberian mines for life.

  Well aware of his opportunity and also of his peril, the Malta chief set out furiously to solve his problem. With careful surveillance, he determined that the flea was happily married and returned home each night to his wife. The fle
a had no known weaknesses and was a faithful husband.

  Fortunately, the Malta chief was up to the task. He recruited the most voluptuous female flea courtesan, who was susceptible to large bribes, with the promise that her father would be released from a Siberian labor camp if she succeeded. It was arranged that she would encounter the flea on his way home to his wife after leaving Pushkin. She used all her wiles on the flea. He found himself in her room making love with her. He was unaware that all of this was being recorded by a hidden camera.

  The flea had his pleasure with the courtesan and went home to his wife, feeling embarrassed by his behavior. He felt even worse when the next day he was picked up by two internal security officers and taken to their headquarters. Shown the embarrassing photos, graphically illustrating his adultery with the flea courtesan, and informed these would be shown his wife unless he agreed to cooperate fully, he had no choice. He was a broken flea. He agreed to become their agent, body and soul.

  Today, Putin contentedly goes on following Pushkin’s advice. The dog by and large gives sound advice to the Russian leader. Occasionally, the flea is instructed to bite Pushkin when the internal security service wishes him to take a course they believe best.

  The former Malta chief has been recalled to Moscow and given two quick promotions. He is now a senior officer in the Federal Security Service and occupies an office next to the Russian President. His sole task is to operate “Operation Flea” as the project is referred to in the intelligence service books. Because of his knowledge of what the flea will do, he has established close personal ties with Putin and is widely expected to be the next chief of the Federal Security Service. And, on another happy note, the courtesan flea’s father was released from the Siberian camp and is now happily residing with his daughter in Moscow.

  THE MOUSE WHO TRAVELED TROUGH TIME

  By Benson Lee Grayson

  It is generally believed that only the human mind is sufficiently complex to formulate the concept of time travel. This is not entirely true. Among the many who fruitlessly attempted throughout history to create a time machine, one individual actually succeeded. He was, surprisingly, not a human, but a member of the species mus musculus or, in ordinary English, a mouse. Ludeveccio, the mouse in question, was born sometime after 1140 A.D. in what was then the Kingdom of Sicily. Its ruler, Roger II, was a descendent of the Normans who left Scandinavia in the Tenth Century in search of a more favorable environment and managed to find their way through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea, and then to the island of Sicily. The Norsemen found it easy to conquer the island. Under Roger II, who succeeded in unifying the various Norman-controlled parts of Sicily into one Kingdom, agriculture and trade with the Arab lands to the east, flourished.

  Ludeveccio had the good fortune to be born and grow up in the palace of King Roger II. His father had died early in his infancy as the result of an encounter, while inebriated, with a palace cat, and so the young Ludeveccio and his siblings were raised exclusively by their mother, Maria. The latter was extremely intelligent and Ludeveccio along among his siblings inherited her intelligence and then some. His mother was an excellent provider, furnishing her young with all manner of delicious cheeses, obtained during the night from the palace larder. As a result, Ludeveccio did not have to devote his time to searching for food. Each evening, he spent his time listening to the wise men who counseled the King and his Court. The adolescent Ludeveccio found himself particularly fascinated in the discussions of mathematics and science, many of them based on the knowledge of the ancients which had been preserved by the Arabs and which had been carried to Sicily by travelers.

  Ludeveccio’s life changed for the worse in 1154, when Roger II died and was succeeded by his son William I, known in history as William the Bad. The loss of the foreign territories conquered by Roger II caused a lowering of the general standard of living. This was particularly felt in the palace, where Maria now was barely able to feed herself, let alone her children. Ludeveccio’s siblings departed Sicily one by one, on ships headed for other countries in the Mediterranean, hoping to find greater opportunities there.

  Ludeveccio, however, was too prudent to embark for a foreign destination without some knowledge of what he might find there. When Maria succumbed to old age and Ludeveccio finally concluded that he, too, would have to leave Sicily, it was too late; the number of vessels setting out from Sicily had been severely diminished. No matter. Ludeveccio was certain that his brilliant mind and the knowledge of advanced science and mathematics he had acquired would enable him to find a solution.

  In this, Ludeveccio was not mistaken. Why not create, he thought, a device that would not only transport him out of Sicily to a place of greater opportunity, but also through time, to a period in which living conditions for mice were more favorable. The exact nature of the machine he fabricated has been lost in history, but it most definitely worked. On a dismal fall morning, so Ludeveccio later remarked, he mounted the time machine and set off.

  The device fabricated by Ludeveccio actually worked! Within a few seconds the intrepid mouse found himself leaving the soil of Sicily and flying high over the waters of the Mediterranean. It must be added, however, that the time machine did suffer from some defects. It could be turned on and stopped, but it contained no controls for the speed at which it traveled, either through space or time, and no means of knowing whether it was traveling into the future or into the past. There was a rudimentary steering mechanism, consisting of a sail, but it blew off because of strong gusts of wind, as Ludeveccio flew over the Straits of Gibraltar and into the broad Atlantic. It was not that Ludeveccio had been unaware before he commenced his epic-making trip of these flaws in the device’s design. Rather, he had knowingly sacrificed efficiency in the interests of speed of construction.

  Ludeveccio was further handicapped by his ability to judge his time in the air. The sun was moving to rapidly in the sky for him to make accurate solar observations and the wrist watch had not yet been invented. After an unknown period, part of which the mouse was asleep, he awakened and saw he was once again over land and slowly descending in altitude. Beneath him he could see an unending land mass, covered with trees, occasionally some dessert, and one long and high chain of mountains.

  Finally, Ludeveccio got a glimpse of water bordering a strip of sandy coastline. As he neared the water, he could see that it was vast, quite possibly another ocean. All this was, of course, new to Ludeveccio. He possessed a good knowledge of the charts and maps available in Twelfth Century Sicily, but none of them covered much beyond Europe, the Near East and the northern part of Africa.

  The time machine gently touched down on the sand, close to the water, as though it was being guided by a divine hand. Ludeveccio stepped on to the sand. It was warm under his feet, but felt good after the cold of the higher altitude at which he was been travelling. He had not the slightest idea of where he was or whether he had traveled into the past or the future. Still, conditions were probably better than they had been in Sicily. Certainly, the ruler would have to be better than William the Bad.

  Ludeveccio set fearlessly in search of some mouse he could ask. None were anywhere in sight. The sole occupants of the beach appeared to be large seabirds, who were interested in dining on fish rather than mouse and paid him no interest.

  Some distance down the beach, ludeveccio spotted something dark lying at the water’s edge, washed over by the encroaching tide. As he neared it, he realized it was the body of a human lying face down, only the head still uncovered by the waves. At first he thought it was dead, but realized as he watched it that the person was still breathing.

  Ludeveccio’s first inclination was to leave the human in the surface where he had found it and proceed on his search. As his mother had taught him, it’s a wise mouse who does not stick his nose into matters which do not concern him. However, Ludeveccio’s tender heart came into play. He was certainly not as pious as his mother, Maria, had been, but he still entertained th
e belief that a merciful God would overlook his occasional lapses and permit him one day to enter Mouse Heaven. He reversed his steps and returned to the body. The tide had advanced further in just a few minutes and only the back of the body’s head still protruded from the water.

  It was clear to Ludeveccio that the body was far too large and heavy for a small mouse to move on his own. Ludeveccio walked rapidly to the side of the head and saw an ear exposed. He bit it gingerly, hoping to awaken the human. No result. He bit harder. The body quivered, nothing more. Desperate measures would have to be applied.

  Ludeveccio step back for a minute to muster all his strength and then bit the ear as hard as he could. The body sat up and the head turned to face him. Slowly it opened its eyes. They were as red as any eyes the mouse had ever seen. “Wash the matter?” it asked.

  Back in Sicily, Ludeveccio had acquired a smattering of many foreign languages from the conversations of the foreign traders he had overheard at the palace. This man, that the human was male was a conclusion he reached from its deep voice, seemed to be speaking a form of archaic English.

  “My name is Ludeveccio,” he said. “I am a stranger here. I come from Sicily.”

  “Ishaly? Where’s that?” asked the man. When he spoke, his words were accompanied by a smell of hard liquor.

  So that was the matter, Ludeveccio concluded. The man was not sick or injured, just highly intoxicated. Ludeveccio never indulged in hard spirits, himself, cautious not to repeat the fate of his later father, who had been killed while inebriated. Still, many of the humans in the palace had overindulged, and Ludeveccio had been a silent observer of their behavior.

  “What’s your name?” he politely inquired of the man.