“A completely conditioned response is a form of temporary insanity, surely? A loss of control? A reflex action? Remove the stimulus and you remove the insanity. It’s exactly what Quentin Riossiti used to write in his books.”
“Riossiti being a cat,” Schrödinger noted with a smile, “whom you now suspect of being deeply involved in the conditioning process in the first place.”
“Speculation, admittedly,” Lap said, “but it certainly seems possible that Riossiti, as the unwitting architect of the whole brainwashing program, became the scapegoat for the murders committed by an unknown number of previous ferals—the test cases—and through his guilt and self-disgust he elected not to reveal the truth under oath. Because he wanted to protect the real killers—ferals he regarded as innocent victims.”
Schrödinger was pacing back and forth, chin in paw, as he might once have done in front of the bench. “Guilty in action but not spirit,” he mused. “A furry area for the law, which prefers to deal with absolutes. It reminds me of a legal thought experiment I used to put to my students—‘Schrödinger’s dog.’ Imagine, if you will, a puppy ripped from its mother’s teat and kept day and night in a sealed container. The puppy has no contact with the outside world other than the rubber tube through which it is fed. But through all its months of weaning and whelping the poor creature is subjected to daily bursts of electricity, blasts of hot and cold water, loud noises, and violent shaking of the container. The dog emerges after two years and promptly goes on a murder spree. So the question now is: Who is ultimately responsible for the murder? The murderer himself or the master who made him murderous?”
“The master,” I gnashed, remembering my days in the madhouse. “It’s gotta be.”
“It must surely come down to a matter of intent,” Lap added. “Because if the intention from the start is to control a subject’s reflexes, and in so doing turn him into a weapon of propaganda—as is the case in this instance—then surely it is the master who absorbs the guilt? Making the murderer an innocent victim?”
“And yet it is all so difficult to prove, is it not?” Schrödinger looked happy to be tying us up in knots. “And such complexities have traditionally defeated the sharpest legal minds. What, for instance, if Schrödinger’s dog were subjected to all those torments and humiliations not to rile him but to pacify him—to show him who’s boss, for his own good? And what if the conditioning only backfired, even after the passage of years? Who is guilty then? The puppet or the puppetmaster? And what does that mean for societies that program its citizens to respond on reflex? Are they—the societies—then responsible when their puppies blunder around the world, chewing slippers and soiling welcome mats? It would take years to argue such a case.”
“And yet we don’t have years. We have one night, if even that. We have—”
But Lap was interrupted again by his pocket jangler. He answered and his whiskers stiffened. “Thank you—we’ll be there immediately.”
He rang off, fixed me with cold blue eyes, and spoke in a voice that had already sprung to action: “That was Chief Kessler,” he said. “There’s been a positive sighting of the Cat near the corner of Glory and Hallelujah.”
I WAS ARMED with a Fido & Wesson; Lap had a small carton of full-cream milk.
The electricity went out as we left the expressway, just as Lap had arranged with a longhaired techno cat from the Cradles. The streetlights, the houselights, the porchlights, the night-lights, the neons, the advertising lamps, the insect zappers, everything that buzzed and belled in a three-sprint radius—all went off in a blink. I hit the horn to clear a path through the unlit streets as overhead the thwuckers of the CAT Squad roared toward Glory and Hallelujah.
But Lap, with a street map spread out before him like a board game, was counting on his logic and feline instincts to give us a head start. For days he’d been tracking the Cat’s movements across the city grid; now he reckoned he could tell where the feral would be before the feral knew himself.
“Stop here,” he said, and I slammed the brakes so hard the poco-wagon almost sprang off its chassis. “There’s a bakery directly behind these tenements. The crumbs will attract birds and rats. Birds and rats will attract the Cat.”
“Sure about this?”
“Skin me if I’m wrong.”
We bustled up a fire escape just as residents started yapping about the blackout. Mounted at the top of the tenement was a huge REELECT GOODBOY/PALOMINE billboard. The sodium lamps were still smoking. Latching on to one of the stanchions Lap swung onto the roof and lowered a paw to drag me up as well.
I made sure I didn’t whimper. Ahead was a vast rolling meadow of rooftops: slate, tiles, tin, corrugated iron, and all of it patched, gummed, daubed, crumbling, or plain missing—they didn’t do a lot of roof repairs in the Kennels. But Lap didn’t waste a second. He took to a narrow ledge in the center of the roof like it was a garden path, signaling that I should fan out. I lowered a foot onto a rusty sheet of metal, wasn’t sure it would hold my weight, then gulped and lowered myself completely. But the roof didn’t give way. I didn’t fall through. I hugged the side of the building and inched my way around a row of oozing stink pipes.
To my left rose the Cathedral of Our Master, spires tall and black against the stars. Two blocks away the thwuckers of the CAT Squad were circling like dragonflies. Searchlights were probing Glory Street, Hallelujah Street, the alleys, the rooftops. And everywhere mutts were spilling onto balconies, flinging open windows, growling, making a racket. Ahead I could just make out the silhouette of Lap, scrambling over a vent stack toward the bakery—I hoped he knew what he was doing.
I hadn’t taken ten steps after him when my right leg suddenly disappeared through some rusty tin. There was a loud crash as plaster landed on the floor below. Someone started barking. I buttressed myself against a brick wall and dragged my leg free, shoeless. And suddenly I was hit by a blaze of light.
It was one of the thwuckers, curling around the cathedral towers, searchlights glaring. I shrank back behind the bricks and hunched up. The pool of light splashed over the top of the wall, lighting up stink pipes and cooling units and clouds of steam—swinging back and forth, up and down, over the chimneys, around spinning fans, across the tar-papered roofs, and all the time the rotors were whacking and yammering, and I was pinned in place with ears flattened, hoping like hell that not a hair on my bobble was peeping over the wall.
Then a flare was thrown down on the roof, hissing and spraying, flashing between cracks. I had to roll up like a wood louse, my snout buried in my gut, frozen as a garden gnome.
There were a few more painful seconds of sparkling light, then the thwucker finally gave up and swung away, heading back to its mates a block away. I was safe again.
Or at least I thought I was.
Because the flare was still spluttering and giving off enough light for me to see, shining between a couple of busted water tanks, two yellow eyes as big as a tiger’s.
I was pressed against the wall not ten leashlengths away. And the Cat was staring straight at me.
I could smell him now: grease, blood, rat guts, feathers, fear. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even think straight. All I could see was him ripping Jack Russell Crowe apart like a Twinkie. I was no longer a bullie—I was a titmouse.
The Cat started moving. His eyes were coming out of the darkness. I fumbled for my gun, hearing something rising up from the bottom of my windbag—a string of words, a prayer, a plea:
“Good kitty-kitty…”
“You found him!”
I jumped, but it was only Lap, returning to my side.
I pushed myself up, pointing. “There,” I whispered, “between the tanks.”
“I see him!”
Lap edged forward, fearless, shaming me. He stopped about two leashlengths distant and flipped his ID, like he was speaking to a mere bird smuggler. “I don’t know your proper name,” he said in his creamiest voice, “but I’m unarmed and mean you no harm. So please�
��”
But there was a screech from behind as someone lowered a fire escape. The Cat sprang out of hiding and ran for his life.
He loped across the rooftop on all fours—a lot smaller than I expected, and moving as fast as a weasel.
“Let’s go!” said Lap before bolting off in pursuit, and I felt old instincts swell inside me—the thrill of the chase.
So I ran, too, bounding and scratching across the roof as bits and pieces of metal fell away beneath me in explosions of rust. Ahead, the Cat threw himself across an alley onto the roof of the bakery. Lap followed without a second thought. Flappers burst into the air, squeakers scampered. At the edge of the tenement I took a gulp of the yeasty air and sprang, too, landing on all fours and bounding forward before I had a chance to fall. In the darkness below, dogs were barking crazily.
A block away the flak-jacketed moggies of the CAT Squad were dropping like spiders from their thwuckers. Searchlights were waving everywhere. The Cat, seeing them, did a sudden U-turn. Lap swung around just as smoothly. I changed direction, too, bouncing off a cooling unit with a clang. The three of us scratched and scrambled across the roof, sprang across the alleyway again, and landed back on the tissue tin of the tenement, fighting for support.
But the Cat was limping all of a sudden—he’d damaged a leg on a jagged sheet of metal. He dragged himself around some exhaust fans and headed back for the safety of his water tanks, where the flare was still spluttering. Lap made for the center ledge as I struggled across the slope.
The Cat was between the water tanks. Lap, inching toward him, had pulled out his secret weapon.
“Here!” he said. “You must be thirsty!”
He popped open the carton and splashed some milk into a small dish.
“I offer you this as a symbol of our goodwill!” he said. “We mean you no harm, I promise you—we can save you!”
The Cat’s bloodshot peepers were glowing in the flare light. He stared at the dish. Half a block away more thwuckers were arriving.
“You need have no fear about the milk—it’s unpasteurized and unhomogenized!”
As if to prove it, Lap got down on all fours and had a lick, lactose intolerance and all.
“Delicious,” he said, “and all yours!”
And slowly something—trust or thirst—seemed to get the better of the Cat. He edged out from between the tanks. He headed for the ledge. Lap bowed and backed away.
“Please take some sustenance, take all the time you need, and we’ll talk when you’re finished.”
The Cat reached the dish and sniffed the milk. And I saw, in the fluttering light, just how bony, scurfy, and matted he was—I almost felt sorry for him.
Lap looked at me and nodded—trust had been won.
The Cat stuck his licker into the milk and started slurping.
PING!
Something whanged off the ledge.
Lap looked up and cried, “NO!”
The feral got blown off his feet, squealing. Milk sprayed everywhere.
Another shot. The feral bolted off again into the darkness, bowling Lap aside.
I wheeled around and saw a pointy-eared shadow with a huge rifle in the cathedral tower—Carlos the Jackal.
I ripped out my Fido & Wesson and woofed off a couple of shots just as Lap rolled past and over the edge of the tenement, clinging to the gutter with his claws.
Carlos meanwhile yelped like someone had stood on his tail. I fired off more shots—I emptied the whole chamber—until I saw him plunge into the tower. His rifle clattered down the cathedral roof.
I was reaching over to help Lap—the guttering was crumbling—when I heard it.
DING.
A sound like you’d hear at the end of the world.
DONG.
A bell like no other.
DING DONG.
The bell that ruled us all.
DING DONG DILL.
The bells of Our Master. The body of Carlos the Jackal had got tangled up in the ropes of the cathedral tower.
And I heard something else—a hiss like a busted steam pipe. But this sound came from the darkness. From a cat. From the Cat.
I turned, staring back across the roof, and froze. “Grab my tail,” I breathed to Lap.
And then I saw him—the feral—creeping back over the ledge, leg after leg, like a giant tarantula. Coming back toward us.
DING.
He was three times the size he’d been a minute earlier.
DONG.
His hair was standing up like needles. His eyes were glaring like headlights. His fangs were bared and dripping. His claws were out like butcher hooks. And he was coming to take out the first dog in sight.
DING DONG DILL.
I stood in place, my gun empty, on the edge of the tenement with Lap clinging desperately to my tail. The Cat was oozing down the roof toward me, lit up by the fizzing flare. He was uncurling. He was rising. Towering over me. His saliva was dripping on me. Blood was jetting from the bullet wound on his shoulder. His eyes were as hot as barbecue coals. And I couldn’t budge. There was nothing I could do but stare.
The bells were fading—ding dong dill—but nothing would stop the Cat from making his kill.
He roared at me like a lion, nearly blowing my whiskers off. He raised a paw—four grizzlylike claws—to cut me to ribbons, just like he’d done to the ’weilers. Just like he’d done to everyone else. I couldn’t breathe.
I was two seconds away from being carved like a Peking duck.
But then—somewhere in the darkness—came another bell, a tinkle.
The Cat frowned. The tinkling stopped. In the blackness there was a presence.
The Cat blinked, tried to make him out.
A long, terrible pause—a cricket actually chirped—then a milk-curdling voice:
“Ding-dong dalemption
Pussy finds redemption.”
Then the collar bell bounded forward. And a shape launched through the air.
The shape seized the feral and forced him off his feet.
The two cats, locked around each other like monkeys, flew over my bobble. They spun head over tail into the space between the cathedral and the tenement, plunging for what seemed half a minute before there was a splat like a couple of exploding watermelons.
Lap hauled himself to safety and together we peered over into the darkness. I picked up the fizzing flare and tossed it down into the alley, where it sprayed its light over a gruesome pasta of catguts.
We were silent for a minute, staring dumbslapped at the two bodies, as the thwuckers of the CAT Squad closed in.
“Fall must’ve killed ’em,” I grunted.
“Not the fall.”
“No?”
“No…” sighed Lap, straightening and shaking his head sadly. “‘Twas Q. Riossiti killed the Cat.”
EPILOGUE
WE DIDN’T DO anything rash. We never did anything rash. It was my very first lesson in the Unscratchables—that justice is a cheese that never grows mold.
Six months after the deaths of Q. Riossiti and the Cat there was a major bowwow at Phineas Reynard’s country estate ninety sprints north of San Bernardo. Reynard himself was there along with Vice President Palomine, Ronald Chump, and a dozen fat-cats representing the press, television, motion pictures, music, publishing, theme parks, and the Internet. On the lunch table was a gobbler-watering mixture of marinated pheasant, pork crackling, lobster in hollandaise sauce, caramel truffles, Roquefort cheese, and mountains of whipped cream. Under discussion—we had the joint bugged—was a bold plan to take neoteny to an all new stage: to reduce the average dog IQ from thirty-four to twenty-six, the average nonfood-related attention span from ten seconds to five, and the average syllable-recognition capacity from two to one. The plan was called Operation Doofus, and everyone around the table cheetah-purred and hyena-chuckled with confidence about their eventual success.
What had happened was this. Between escaping from Cattica and saving us from certain death, Que
ntin Riossiti had plucked the tail feather from a raven, dipped the nib into some wet sidewalk tar, scrawled out the terrible history of Pavlov on the sides of a cracker container and dropped it into the nearest mailbox addressed to “Detective Max” of the San Bernardo Dog Force. Stampless, the container wandered around the postal system like a bamboozled Basenji before eventually landing at the Slaughter Unit, where Chesty White sniffed it out and passed it on to me.
It was ruff-tingling stuff. The grooming of wildcats and ferals to defeat dogs in a host of mutt-dominated sports: boxing, wrestling, tug-of-war, discus catching, dog paddle, bunny chasing, and the marathon. The ruthless training regime, often with fatal results. The strange habit of ferals to go mad in the experimental stage, especially when injected with growth hormones and performance-enhancing drugs. The loss of an untold number of “sparring partners”—usually junkies and Tom Does. The “disposal” of subjects who proved unsuccessful or uncooperative. The bottomless pit of “donations,” sucked from antivivisection charities, to finance the operation. And all this being just one chapter in the unofficial history of the Office of Enforced Perspectives—the part Riossiti had time to scratch across a biscuit box before skedaddling away.
It was enough, anyway, to confront the governor and convince the DA to launch an official investigation. But by the time the case was ready for prosecution Pavlov had vanished like a blast of kettle steam. The warehouse in Loyalty Street had burned to the ground; the headquarters in Kathattan had nothing inside but a nail sharpener and a dead computer mouse; all bank accounts had been liquidated; the directors had gone to ground; the finance trail was a maze within a maze; and all associated companies, from Chump’s to Reynard Media, stubbornly denied any knowledge. Legal advice slapped further doubts on Riossiti’s testimony—the ramblings of a convicted killer who’d tried to plead insanity—and in the end it was decided to postpone all legal proceedings until better evidence could be rounded up.
The Unscratchables Page 20