EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK

by Gahan Wilson

  ‘As you say, Mr Greyer,’ said Bone, ‘with all respect. But this truly marvelous device of yours is only the extension of a bureaucracy, after all, sir, a sort of concretion of it. When all is said and done what it really does is verify and enhance, not escape from, policedom’s previous errors.’

  Greyer studied him carefully, trying to figure out how badly he and his gadget had been insulted.

  ‘However,’ Bone continued, using that kindly smile which seemed to have come to him in his old age, ‘it does strike me that your CLAMP might yield intriguing information if prodded from a new direction. I think I have watched you manipulate the device sufficiently long to be able to operate its keyboard myself, with, of course, your assistance if I make some silly technical gaffe. Would it be presumptuous of me to put a few questions to it directly?’

  Greyer stared at him for a moment, and then shrugged.

  ‘Sure, go ahead,’ he said, standing and waving an almost perfectly square hand at the chair he’d just vacated. ‘Be my guest.’

  Bone settled himself, ran his fingers neatly over the keyboard, and we watched his first question roll itself out in glowing letters on the dark little screen.

  HAS THIS INQUIRY ACTIVATED ANY HERETOFORE INACTIVE PROGRAM?

  Greyer opened his mouth to say something but then left it hanging that way without using it because CLAMP had answered, YES.

  WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE PROGRAM ACTIVATED? Bone typed.

  CURIOUS DRAGON, said CLAMP.

  Bone looked up at Greyer.

  ‘Are you familiar with “Curious Dragon”?’ he asked, but Greyer, whose ordinarily pale face was turning a little pink just said, ‘Excuse me,’ and leaned over Bone’s shoulder in order to type out a string of coded gabble which ended in English with, PLEASE FURNISH AUTHOR.

  AUTHOR NOT AVAILABLE, said CLAMP.

  ‘Very amusing,’ said Bone.

  Greyer straightened, snapped an order to Ashman, paged through the thick manual Ashman handed him, and then leaned over Bone again to type out another, longer string of gibberish which once again ended with, PLEASE FURNISH AUTHOR.

  AUTHOR NOT AVAILABLE, repeated CLAMP.

  Greyer glared at Bone.

  ‘Do me a favor,’ he said, ‘don’t say amusing again, all right? Because Curious Dragon’s overriding that last code means Curious Dragon knows our whole book, so it’s not funny.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive him,’ I interceded helpfully. ‘He’s always had a strange sense of humor.’

  I might have enlarged on that as it’s an interesting subject, but the screen of CLAMP’s monitor had suddenly started making a series of funny patterns beginning with spins and sweeps and swirls and ending with a kind of regular snaky weaving before going back to black except for the little blinking cursor.

  ‘That was quite a light show,’ I said to Bone. ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘CLAMP did the whole thing all on its very own, Weston,’ he said, watching the little screen thoughtfully. ‘I’m only guessing, of course, but I think it was very probably going through some kind of adjustment.’

  Then the cursor moved neatly across the screen, leaving a short, simple sentence behind.

  THOSE LAST QUESTIONS WERE INTELLIGENT.

  And then another.

  IS THAT YOU, ENOCH BONE?

  Bone sat back in his chair and tapped his fingertips together.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘We must be careful, now.’

  ‘I’ll be goddamned,’ said Greyer. The pink in his face had now deepened to a really dangerous-looking dark red and things were standing out on his forehead. ‘Some nervy son of a bitch actually has the brass-bound balls to be talking to us over CLAMP, am I right?’

  ‘We are in contact,’ said Bone. ‘And he is considerably worse than nervy, Mr Greyer. He is highly dangerous.’

  He thought for a moment, then leaned forward and typed out, YES, THIS IS BONE, AND I MUST SAY I AM MOST DISAPPOINTED TO LEARN THOSE SHARKS DID NOT DEVOUR YOU AS WE’D ALL BELIEVED. ARE YOU AT LEAST MUTILATED?

  Greyer, clutching the back of Bone’s chair, let out a little snort when he read that.

  ‘I’m sorry if I appear to be grossly impolite with this creature, especially while using your machine,’ Bone said to him over his shoulder, ‘but ordinary conversational devices are ineffective with a being like the Mandarin; he brushes them aside.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Greyer. ‘That’s fine, that’s just fine. Give the bastard hell!’

  ‘Is there some way of tracing this communication?’

  ‘Get on it, Ashman,’ Greyer snapped, watching the Mandarin’s reply roll across the screen of what once had been his favorite toy.

  IT IS SADDENING TO SEE THAT EVEN GREAT AGE HAS FAILED TO BRING YOU WISDOM, MR BONE. DESPITE YOUR PAST IMPERTINENCES, I HAD STILL HOPED YOU MIGHT YET GRASP THE GLORY OF MY MISSION, BUT I NOW SEE THIS WAS MERELY AN ANCIENT’S KINDLY DREAMING.

  ‘The old villain’s still trying to get you and your brain on his team,’ I said. ‘Remember the time he tried to switch you around with that weird drug in the temple at Karnak?’

  ‘I most certainly do,’ said Bone. ‘How is the tracing going?’

  ‘It’s initiated and in process,’ said Ashman, looking up from a phone in another corner of the room.

  Bone nodded and turned back to the keyboard.

  BOSH, he typed. PATHETIC DRIVEL. WHAT HAS YOUR CAREER BEEN, AFTER ALL, BUT A SERIES OF DISMAL HIDING PLACES, A MISERABLE SCUTTLE FROM ONE RAT HOLE TO ANOTHER? HAVE YOU THOUGHT OF GIVING UP AT LAST? PERHAPS IF YOU COOPERATE WITH ME SUFFICIENTLY AN HONORABLE RETIREMENT MIGHT BE ARRANGED.

  ‘Great!’ said Greyer, through grinding teeth. ‘That’s the stuff! That’ll really get his goat!’

  ‘The trace has gone out to Connecticut,’ said Ashman.

  ‘It seems somehow unlikely,’ said Bone.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Ashman. ‘Now it’s snaking back around in this direction.’

  YOU HAVE GONE TOO FAR, MR BONE, came the Mandarin’s reply. BUT THEN, OF COURSE, YOU ALWAYS DID GO TOO FAR. IT WAS ONE OF YOUR MOST RELIABLE FAILINGS.

  ‘Blast!’ said Bone, jerking his hands away from the keyboard. ‘This thing gave me a nasty shock!’

  DID YOU ENJOY THAT, MR BONE?

  ‘Say, this is really odd,’ said Ashman, speaking from his corner, ‘about the trace. It’s come all the way back. It’s here.’

  ‘In the basement,’ said Bone.

  ‘How did you know?’ gasped Ashman.

  ‘He’s always in some damned basement,’ I said.

  THIS TIME I SHALL TRIUMPH, BONE! THIS TIME, DOG, I WILL STAND ASTRIDE BOTH YOU AND YOUR SILLY WORLD, AND YOUR RHEUMY EYES’ LAST SIGHT WILL BE THE GRINDING OF MY HEEL!

  ‘It’s a pity,’ said Bone, reflectively, ‘that there is no attachment on this device allowing for diabolical laughter.’

  But then there was an expanding fireworks display which started with a sudden sputter and spray of sparks traveling back and forth on the edges of CLAMP’s gadgets and along its connecting wires, moved right along to roman-candle spews of sparks spraying out from all available corners, and then went on to present a grand finale of explosions, commencing with a variety of small cracking pops and working up to a series of really ear-splitting blasts.

  I was just pointing out to Bone that this was probably the diabolical laugher he’d hankered for, when Greyer, who could no longer just stand there and watch all that damage being done to his machine, pushed both Bone and his chair aside and began to type frantically on CLAMP’s keyboard.

  STOP THIS YOU STOP DOING THIS IF YOU DONT STOP I

  But then he went bug-eyed and stiff with his palms flat on the keys and his back arched like a cat’s and no matter how hard Ashman and I whacked and shoved him with wooden chairs and thick code books and other nonconducting items, we weren’t able to budge him off his beloved CLAMP until the damned thing had thoroughly electrocuted him. Only then did it turn off and let him slump smack across its console.r />
  — 9 —

  ‘DIABOLICAL LAUGHTER, INDEED,’ said Bone, then stole a quiet glance down at the steps of the fancy new escalator on which we were all smoothly descending to the basement of the agency’s fancy new building.

  ‘Wondering if the Mandarin’s got this thing wired, too?’ I asked him out of the corner of my mouth. ‘I know I am.’

  ‘I had no idea people built their confounded escalators all the way to their basements,’ said Bone.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’ll be the sort of basement that would make any escalator feel right at home. You won’t be able to tell it from the sixth floor.’

  We stood side by side in the center of a formation of agents grouped on the moving stairs, two groups of about a half dozen each, before and behind. They’d taken to forming protective patterns around us because Bone and I had been elevated to expert status since the simultaneous demolition of their boss and CLAMP, and they felt they needed us.

  They were all puttering with various gadgets just like Santa’s elves, listening to receivers or adjusting knobs, and Ashman, in the lead, was watching the dials and lights of a thing connected to a huge box strapped to the back of an agent by his side, acting as a Sherpa.

  Bone looked at all of it with no obvious signs of approval, then gazed inward and sighed.

  ‘You’d think the passing years might at least have slowed him down,’ he muttered, almost peevishly. ‘Instead, they only seem to have increased his boldness. But to locate one of his burrows right here in the heart of officialdom does seem rather overdoing it, even for him.’

  ‘He’s always been a show-off,’ I said.

  I’d guessed right on the basement; it had indirect lighting and no windows and unstainable wall-to-wall carpets, so you couldn’t tell the hall from any other hall in the building. Bone and I continued in the passive mode, standing and watching as the agents scuttled busily about with their electronic doohickies, pressing them to walls and floors and making them beep and flicker, and eventually they all zeroed in on one particular panel.

  ‘I think this is it,’ Ashman called out. ‘We’re reading a gap hidden in the ceiling above its top and some kind of trick catch on its bottom.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Bone, as they all looked at him expectantly. ‘Be sure you stand back from the front of the panel, and work the catch from as far a distance as possible, if you would.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ asked Ashman. ‘An explosion? Gas?’

  ‘Nothing that demonstrative,’ said Bone. ‘It will be something which would be far less attention-getting, but which would, all the same, quietly and effectively dispose of any solitary person or small group accidentally coming across the entrance.’

  Ashman produced a neat-looking telescopic rod with a sort of robot claw at its end and had been fooling around with the bottom edge of the panel for less than a minute when it suddenly shot up and a nightmare pair of giant steel claws lunged out and clanged its teeth shut on a corridor-wide chomp of air. Before that had barely registered, the jaws shot back as quick or quicker, and the panel slid neatly shut to hide the damned thing—and, in theory, whatever it might have bit into and taken back to its cave—the instant it whisked back.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Bone, eyebrows up and lips pursed.

  ‘Very cute,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t lost his touch. I have to admit that seeing that damn thing takes me back.

  ‘It really does give one rather a nostalgic frisson,’ admitted Bone. ‘What do you suppose the capacity of those jaws might be? Three victims? Possibly four?’

  ‘Make it four and parts of five,’ I said.

  Since to the agents this was all brand new, they just mostly stood and gaped.

  ‘Very well,’ said Bone, after a pause. ‘Now if you’ll trip the panel again, I think you’ll find its guardian won’t bother you the second time around.’

  They did, and it shot up a second time, and when nothing happened for long enough the agents crowded in to have a look. Ashman reached up very carefully to touch the point on one of the jaw’s double rows of teeth, but he cut his finger on it just the same.

  ‘We’ve got a horror like this?’ he said, staring at us. ‘Here? In the basement of our own building?’

  ‘That’s just for starters,’ I said. ‘The Mandarin will have lots more goodies in there. He’s very creative, and some of them may even be alive. So let’s all stay close together.’

  People never do listen, so the words were barely out of my mouth when two agents passed by the jaws in order to advance fearlessly down the corridor beyond, which, I observed, followed the usual décor of a Mandarin tunnel by having all its surfaces painted entirely black and restricting its illumination to dim little lights placed at ten-foot intervals in the ceiling.

  I have to admit I had a momentary temptation to let them go ahead and be a really unforgettable object lesson for the others—after all, I’m only human. Then the better part of me surfaced and I hurried in after them to head them off, but I’d indulged myself too long and the poor simps were already in trouble.

  Sure enough, they hadn’t even got near to where the corridor bent to the left and out of sight when a chunk of floor opened up under the first one so slick and neat the second one only just managed to grab hold of his pal’s gray flannel jacket, and the two of them set up a caterwauling that was hard to believe.

  I snagged them both by their collars like a mother cat and somehow managed to keep them from falling into the pit yawning beneath them until someone got hold of me, and pretty soon everybody managed to get everybody else back to a safe place.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Enough blundering around. Let’s have a little orientation session with Mr Bone.’

  Bone leaned forward a little on his cane with both hands, kept that pose until all the agents were gathered before him, including the rescued ninnies, and when the sound of gasping and heavy breathing had quieted down to his satisfaction, he opened his eyes, gave them all a thoughtful look, and began to speak.

  ‘Mr Weston, here, and I have had some small experience with tunnels of the Mandarin, gentlemen, and before we enter this particular structure, it might contribute to our general survival if I passed on some pertinent advice.’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘First, as to specifics in your locomotion. One: Make it a routine business before entering any Mandarin tunnel to raise one arm so that the tips of your fingers extend above your head and your forearm protects the side of your neck, thus. Keep it there. Always. In that position the fingers will detect webs or tendrils or claws before they have a chance to attach to your scalp, and the forearm will prevent any successful application of a thuggee strangling noose.’

  He looked sternly around until he had gathered a few nods.

  ‘Two: Always proceed forward slowly and carefully. I strongly recommend sliding the feet alternately along the ground, keeping the rear foot in place until the front one has traversed something like a yard. This may seem cumbersome, even ludicrous, but it will help alert you to any change in the ground’s texture, such as emerging poisoned spikes, or the presence of crawling creatures, or any changing inclination of its surface—as with the trapdoor just experienced by your comrades. Also, if you trip the trigger of some devilish apparatus or nudge some groping creature, the thing may succeed only in grabbing your advanced foot, thus leaving the rest of you free to attack or attempt escape.

  ‘Studiously avoid any areas marked off by painted lines, particularly luminescent ones. A shimmering in the air before you should be probed by the barrel of your gun or some other inanimate object, never with your bare hand. Keep your ears peeled for any strange noises, but pay particular attention to what I can fairly describe as gritty clicking, and if you hear a low, warbling whistle, commence firing even if you see nothing at all. Almost especially if you see nothing at all.’

  He paused, looked thoughtfully up, then smiled and nodded at the agents.

  ‘I think that wi
ll do,’ he said.

  We started off into the tunnel in the escalator formation, half the agents behind us and half before, with Ashman in the lead, everybody following Bone’s locomotion specifics which, in no time at all, paid off.

  ‘I think I feel something with my toe!’ Ashman called out.

  ‘Well done!’ said Bone, smiling. ‘Let us by, please.’

  I arrived on his left side and Bone on his right, then Bone had him pull his foot back and probed the black floor ahead of us with his cane.

  ‘What did it feel like, Mr Ashman?’ he asked.

  ‘Like snakes,’ said Ashman. ‘Wet. Slimy, I think.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bone, peering this way and that. ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘Only a kind of blur,’ said Ashman. ‘Like it whipped back around that corner after I touched it.’

  ‘So it’s visible, at least,’ I said.

  ‘Do you have grenades,’ Bone asked.

  ‘My God, no,’ said Ashman, ‘I never thought of grenades!’

  ‘Get together three of your best shots with your largest guns, I don’t think you can use more and hope for unison, and have them lean round that corner and immediately fire as one. They must do this without any attempt to understand or analyze what they’re shooting at because if they stop to look at it they may only stand and gape.’ Bone stepped back. ‘Tell them to continue firing until whatever it is has stopped moving altogether. Do it now.’

  Ashman did and the three marksmen did and the noise of the shooting was loud enough to hurt, but we didn’t mind in the least when we edged our way around the corner and saw what had been killed.

  ‘I thought so,’ said Bone, almost chuckling, ‘it’s that ghastly land squid he developed in the caverns under Monte Carlo! He’s improved on it too, by George. Look at those mandibles! And he’s got it all black now so it’s really hard to see.’

  ‘They still die just as messy,’ I said, then I told the agents to reform the group and move on, and they obeyed their orders, stepping over and through the squid without a murmur. When we came to the first branching of the tunnel, Bone had Ashman fire some good-sized holes into the floor to mark where we’d just come from, and after some discussion as to whether we should turn left or right we chose right because somebody figured we might as well head uptown.