Bugs
Page 21
‘Good is –’
Fred stepped forward and swung Ginger’s leg like a club. Robinson fell back in the snow.
‘– is evil because, wait, listen, because –’
Fred hit him again. The goggling eyes looked more comical than ever. In his struggles to rise, Robinson was making a snow angel.
‘– because, stop hitting me, because your own good is your own interest, to interest is to attract –’
Fred hit him again.
‘– to attract is to seduce, to seduce is to corrupt, corrupt means evil.’
Fred hit him again, and again, until the head was smashed and the body stopped trembling. Then he tore open the overcoat and opened the chest panel. Best to be sure. He removed the green circuit-boards, one by one, and flung them away in the snow. Murderer, murderer, murderer, he thought, not sure whether he meant Robinson or Fred, as he did the work of Jack the Ripper, who tore open each victim to remove ‘a certain organ’.
Out of the infinite black sky the snow came down to cover all sins.
At the airport, Fred tried to read his paper. (The President was officially insane. The deciding factor had been his attempt to fire the Secretary of State and replace him with a hydrangea. However, Congress acceded to the pressure of the Schizophrenics Action Committee and agreed to let him continue in office.) He was distracted by the exclamations of two women.
Disgusting!’
‘An animal!’
Fred looked up to see what they saw: a man blowing his nose on the floor. It was Raab.
‘Hey, Freddie. How goes it?’ Raab strolled over, wiping his hand on his jeans before he offered it for a handshake. ‘Fine … uh, Raab. And you?’
‘I made out OK. MIT. You sound like you got a cold.’
‘Laryngitis, I guess. So, you’re studying at MIT.’
‘Naw, man, not studying. Teaching. I’m the new Professor of Computer Science down there.’
‘Professor.’
‘Yeah, see, I did this paper when I was at the U, where I found a new class of NP-hard problems, but you don’t want to hear about all that.’ He sat down next to Fred. Fred immediately noticed his strong unpleasant smell, compounded of halitosis, dirty underwear and stale sweat. Fred could see pustules on Raab’s cheeks, tiny rolls of black dirt clinging to Raab’s neck. The smell of rotting tennis shoes rose like fumes from a swamp.
‘Raab, why don’t you clean up before you go?’
‘Clean up?’
‘Take a shower. They’ve got public showers over there by the men’s room. Have a good wash and change your clothes.’
‘Hey, a great idea.’
‘It’ll help you make a better impression at MIT.’
‘I doubt that, but what the heck?’
Fred avoided the gaze of the two women. In a few minutes, Raab returned. He looked and smelt the same.
‘You didn’t take a shower?’
‘Well, I was gonna, I had the quarters and everything, only then I saw this new arcade game, RatStar, so …’
Fred breathed through his mouth until Raab’s flight was called. Raab insisted on another handshake. ‘Take care of that cold, man. You sound like our old robot.’
Fred went to wash his hand afterwards, then strolled around the airport. He was just sitting down again when Manse hove into view, carrying what looked like a sample-case covered in crocodile.
‘Sorry about the money, man. The company is belly-up and the feds are biting our ass. Your stock isn’t worth much.’
‘I heard on the news.’
‘Time for me to move on to a new venture. I’m going into a new partnership with this General Lutz.’
‘General Lutz? General Buddy Lutz?’
‘Hey, you got quite a cold there. Sounds like George C. Whatsit. General Buddy Lutz – yup, he’s my new partner. He’s retiring now. That means we get to use his special expertise in robotics. He can open a lot of weaponry doors for us.’
‘Weaponry doors?’
‘See, the aggressive characteristic of our Robinson Robots makes them lousy toys. But it could make them very useful as tiny smart weapons.’
‘How’s that?’
‘No time to go into it now, they’re calling my flight. I’m hitting a smart weapons show in Washington. Here, this will explain everything.’ Manse delved in his sample-case and handed Fred a brightly coloured brochure.
‘Guess I might as well buy you out. Just a minute.’ He opened a snakeskin billfold and fished out some money. ‘A hundred and forty dollars, man. Sorry.’
Fred heard his own London flight announced. At the same time, someone snatched the $140 from his hand.
‘Hey!’
‘Simon Stylite,’ said the thief, flashing an ID card. ‘IRS. You’re not getting on that flight, Jones. We’ve got to talk.’
Fred looked at him for a moment. Then he came to his feet suddenly, smashing his forehead into the IRS agent’s face.
Agh, Jesus!’ Stylite staggered back, holding his bleeding nose. Fred snatched back the money and ran for his plane.
He was held up only seconds at the X-ray machine, the metal detector, the brief body-search, luggage-search, ultra-scan and sniffer dogs, then he ran down the concourse. Far behind him he heard running footsteps.
‘Jodes? Just a bidute. You’re in real trouble, lodes.’
Fred ran. On to the gate, diving through the milling crowd, shoving into the line.
‘Excuse me, excuse me, emergency, sorry, excuse me …’
Down the tin tunnel, waving his boarding-pass at the astonished flight-attendants, into the plane and down the aisle past the British passengers packing into overhead bins their duty free and their Minneapolis souvenirs (lefse, wild rice, maple syrup, Garrison Keillor sweatshirts), the American passengers fetching down blankets and pillows or wondering whether they should just keep their coats on because doesn’t everyone dress up in Britain? Past them all and into a toilet. Almost immediately, someone banged at the door. ‘Jodes, this is Sibod Stylite of the IRS. I dough you’re id there, Jodes. But it woad do you eddy good, Jodes. We have bed id touch with the State Departbed, ad they have withdrawd your passport.’
Fred sat quietly, studying the bright brochure: TINY WARRIOR X13 – BIG FIREPOWER IN A LITTLE PACKAGE.
The front page depicted a painted battle scene with tanks, helicopters, and smoke. The perspective was that of the losing side. A far-off helicopter appeared to be dropping hundreds of dwarf soldiers across a field. In the middle distance, the dwarfs were swarming like cockroaches over a tank, climbing into its ventilators and ports. Nearby, a dwarf shot laser beams into the face of a soldier; another soldier was already down, with dwarfs sitting upon him in triumph.
After a few minutes, a flight attendant knocked and said: ‘Mr Jones, can you come out?’
He straightened up to his full height and opened the door.
‘Mr Jones, this man says the State Department has cancelled your passport. If that’s true, you’ll have to deplane.’
Fred looked at Stylite, holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose. ‘There must be some mistake. The State Department has nothing to do with my passport. I am a British subject, on my way home. Here’s my passport.’
Stylite sputtered in his handkerchief, but had no reply. Within a few minutes, he was forced to deplane alone, defeated. An old man waiting for the toilet turned to look at him. ‘Say, what’s wrong with that fella’s nose?’
‘Altitude,’ Fred explained.
An hour or so later, the plane was airborne. Fred slipped into the non-being of a flight. He opened a glossy magazine provided by the airline and stared at the red lines on the map. The polar route. He could close his eyes and see the polar ice-cap, blowing snow, a misshapen figure lurching across the ice: James Arness or Boris Karloff.
Then it was the Vexxo site again. The quiet snow. Nothing moving. Then something moved, a hand clawing its way up through the snow. A single disembodied hand groping about until it finds the first green
circuit board, drags it back to the body and installs it.
The hand tapped him on the shoulder.
He awoke. The moon face looking down at him belonged to the despicable Mr Hook.
‘Fred Jones, isn’t it? That seat next to you empty? Good show. I’ll just nip in for a natter.’
‘Mr Hook.’
‘Captain Hook, actually. I have a navy commission. We all do in our line of work.’
Hook settled into the seat next to Fred, and commenced staring at him with an owlish intensity. ‘Frankly, we’d like to ask you to join the Firm.’
‘What firm?’
‘The Firm. The Firm. Can’t make it plainer than that without spelling it out. You must have read John Le Carré. Verb. sap.’
‘You want me to join M15, is that it?’
‘Not so loud.’ Hook took off his oversized glasses, and polished them on his tie.
‘Your tie, Captain Hook.’
‘What about it?’
‘Charing Cross Poly. My college.’
‘Amazing coincidence,’ said Hook.
‘No, it isn’t. You put it on deliberately to appear sympathetic. All part of the standard Gestapo interrogation procedure.’
‘Very good!’
‘But no one who actually went to Charing Cross Poly would dream of putting on one of their filthy ties.’
Hook came close to laughing. ‘Excellent. Clever lad. You’ll do well in the Firm.’
‘Not a chance.’
‘Let me tell you, we’ve been watching you for some time. You first came to our attention at Esperanto’s.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Esperanto’s in New York. When you near as like bagged the Emir. You handled that well.’
‘I did what?’
‘Then your liaison with Miss Ivanova, at the same time you were dealing with the wily Nipponese. Not to mention the free telly you managed to wangle out of the Koreans. And you got next to General Lutz by bedding his inamorata, Rain Fellini. We found you everywhere we looked, Jones. Your tradecraft is superb. No one knows who you are. Yet you’re obviously a player in the big game.’
‘You’re obviously round the bloody twist.’
‘The marvellous part is how you never broke cover, not even when that criminal lunatic came after you with a knife. Not even just now, nutting that poor IRS agent. Where I come from, we used to call that a Kirby kiss. Anyway, you are most definitely our kind of player.’
‘Piss off.’
‘First let me elaborate. We offer a competitive salary, job security, expenses, a car – only an Escort, mind, but we can’t all have Aston Martins with machine-guns, can we? There’s also an attractive pension plan, the usual tea-breaks and so on.’
‘Piss off.’
‘Then there’s our club. Very popular dining-room. Meat and two veg every day. Choice of afters: rhubarb and custard, or spotted dick.’
‘Piss off.’
‘The club bar isn’t quite what it was before the cuts, but what is? South African sherry isn’t all that bad, once you get used to it. And there are full athletic facilities; we like our people to keep in trim. Complete line of exercise equipment, sauna, birching, handcuffs, barbed wire, whatever you fancy. Even dressing up in Sister’s clothes.’
‘That wasn’t my idea.’
‘Pity.’
‘Just piss off.’
‘Think it over, Jones. Whoever you’re working for, if you ever get bored, give us a ring at this number.’ He handed Fred a card. ‘I’d better get back to my seat in business class. It really ought to be first class, but what with the cuts …’
When Hook was gone, Fred dozed again. He was watching a new type of television which emulated fine Dutch paintings. The screen or canvas showed a kind of Vermeer, a painting glowing with the cool light of Delft. It showed a servant girl wearing a quiet subdued expression. The light of Vermeer shone out of her fine skin, shone on the bare wall behind her, shone reflected in the liquid corner of her eye.
One thing was unlike Vermeer. In place of the conventional cloth cap, this girl had covered her hair with a beaded brown cap. The cap glistened oddly. He found himself looking at it as he approached her.
On closer inspection, the glistening cap was a tight cluster of killer bees. The girl was not calm; she was frozen with fear, terrified of making the slightest movement.
‘Keep still,’ he said. ‘I’ll draw them away.’ Then the girl lifted her eyes and looked at Fred.
‘Keep still? I’m dead.’ Her voice hummed like a swarm. ‘Can’t you see I’m dead. They have built their hive in my skull.’
In mine, too, he realized. In all of us. There are no people left. Kudzu the magnificent had spoken. No more humans, only walking hives, humming, humming the killer code.
‘Too late for us,’ he groaned out of his sleep. ‘But you can save yourselves. Keep watching the skies … keep watching the skies …’
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Also by John Sladek
Novels
The Reproductive System (1968) (aka Mechasm)
The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970)
Roderick (1980)
Roderick At Random (1983)
Tik-Tok (1983)
Bugs (1989)
Wholly Smokes
Collections
The Steam-Driven Boy (1970)
Keep The Giraffe Burning (1977)
Alien Accounts (1982)
The Lunatics Of Terra (1984)
Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2001)
John Sladek (1937 - 2000)
John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael Moorcock’s groundbreaking New Worlds magazine. Sladek began writing SF with ‘The Happy Breed’, which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, and is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections include The Muller Fokker Effect, Roderick and Tik Tok, for which he won a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there in March 2000.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © The Estate of John Sladek 1989
All rights reserved.
The right of John Sladek to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11060 1
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
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