In Your Dreams (10 page)

Paul nodded.

‘Actually,' Benny went on, ‘I think you can probably handle this one okay. I mean, you know all the theory and procedures and stuff, and it's only a titchy little job. I guess,' he added, with a total lack of sincerity, ‘it'll be good experience for you. I mean, better to cut your teeth on something small like this rather than get chucked in at the deep end.' He was scribbling something on a blue stores requisition. ‘You'd better take a taxi to get there,' he said. ‘Some of the stuff's quite bulky, and none of it's really the sort of gear you can take on the Tube.' Paul, glancing over his shoulder, caught sight of the words
35mm anti-tank grenade
and decided it was nice that there was something that he and Benny could agree on.

As it turned out, all the kit fitted quite easily into a large suitcase; and it wasn't far, in any case. The job, according to the file Benny handed him, was to dispose of a small but moderately vicious wyvern that was nesting in a Cashpoint machine at the Piccadilly Circus end of Oxford Street. So far, it had confined itself to eating customers' cards, which wasn't a problem since they were used to it and therefore didn't suspect anything unusual. Inside the file, Paul found a note in Benny's handwriting:
Suggest 50 ml SlayMore mixed 25:1 w/tap water delivered by plant mister through slot; failing which use your discretion and try not to blow up any bldgs
. It was more helpful than some of Benny's other suggestions, but not by much.

When Paul got there, he found that the bank people had already put out orange plastic cones and a yellow-and-white tape; a better invisibility magic than anything he'd come across in the office-procedures manual. He put down his suitcase, took out the dummy cashpoint card he'd been issued with, and very gingerly fed it into the slot. As anticipated, it went in and didn't come out again. The little wisp of blue smoke that drifted up from the slot afterwards was so slight that he wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't been looking for it.

Unfortunately, although he'd brought the plant mister and a bottle of Evian, he'd forgotten the SlayMore. The thought of going back to the office and explaining didn't appeal to him. Nor (rather to his surprise) did the idea of taking a life. True, killing a fellow life form wasn't something he'd ever choose to do, but in his list of priorities getting the job done without making a total bog of it would normally have towered over mercy like an overgrown Alp. Possibly it was all those trips to the bank, seeing at first hand what it was like on the other side of the final curtain; anyhow, he didn't want to do it, and maybe there was another way. He'd read enough broadsheet newspapers to know that violence is always the problem, never the solution, and that a sword is a piece of steel with a victim at either end; the way of peace, however, will always prevail, if only enemies can be made to talk to each other. Which would be fine, if he could speak Wyvern.

Communication; that was the key. All Paul had to do was figure out how to get through to the little scaly horror, and everything would be peachy.

Communication: communication begins with information, and information is about the only thing the twenty-first century's good at. In his wallet, Paul had a whole deck of little plastic rectangles which held, in digital form, every single bit of information about him in the whole world. He pulled them out: Visa card, social-security card, video-library card, mobile-top-up card, Boots bonus-point card – a Tarot pack containing his entire past, present and future – and began stuffing them into the slot, one after another. Puffs of smoke came out like on a really bad day at the Vatican. As the last one vanished into the black hole, he stood back and waited. Inevitably, the wyvern would by now have a complete picture of Paul Carpenter, his station in life, his obligations, resources, passions, habits. From these, the canny creature would realise that Paul wasn't its enemy, just a friend it hadn't met yet. It would come out, they'd exchange expressions of mutual respect in sign language, and nobody would have to die or get their fingers bitten.

He waited. Nothing happened. Then, just as Paul was starting to wonder what had gone wrong, the slot burped at him.

Shit
, he thought.

He spent the next ten minutes trying to fish around inside the slot with a plastic ruler, until that got eaten too. He tried kneeling beside the machine and singing into it: music is a purer form of communication than words – whales sing to each other, and you never read about mugged whales. Then he tried pleading, and threats.

Come along, Paul urged himself, this is pathetic. What would Jean-Luc Picard do? But it occurred to him that every time Jean-Luc found himself at the mercy of an unseen super-intelligent adversary, it turned out to be a lost, frightened little orphan who really only wanted to go home. Suddenly, the idea of a stiff jolt of SlayMore made a lot of sense. Unfortunately, he had no cash for a ride back to the office, and the bloody machine had swallowed his card.

What would Benny do? Well Paul knew the answer to that, it was on the little bit of paper he'd so recklessly ignored. What would Mr Wurmtoter do? Or Mr Tanner, or Professor van Spee? He considered these questions for a while, and then realised that he was asking the wrong questions. The right question, of course, was: what would Paul Carpenter do, assuming Paul Carpenter's IQ was at least double his shoe size?

‘Having problems?' said a voice to his left.

He jumped up – he'd been crouching on the ground so that he could whisper into the slot without having to crick his neck – and looked round to see who'd spoken. There was a beautiful girl standing next to him – tall, willowy, natural redhead, lovely smile that almost managed to conceal the fact that it had only just evolved from a rather distinctive grin—

‘You,' Paul growled. Then he remembered. ‘I thought you were off on maternity leave or something.'

‘I am,' the flame-haired beauty replied. ‘Been for my check-up. Harley Street, just over there.' She waved a hand in some direction or other. ‘Only goblin gynaecologist in Western Europe.'

‘Right,' Paul said. ‘And I suppose that –
skin
you're wearing is just some old thing you found at the back of the wardrobe.'

‘I like to look nice,' Mr Tanner's mum replied. ‘What's wrong with that? I mean, which would you rather look at, this or a six-months-pregnant goblin?'

Paul shrugged. ‘Anyhow,' he said, ‘the answer to your question is yes.'

Mr Tanner's mum took a step towards the bank machine and sniffed. ‘Let me guess,' she said.

‘Wyvern, right? And you've been feeding it plastic.'

Paul nodded. ‘That's a mistake, isn't it?'

She smiled. ‘'Fraid so,' she said. ‘Only two ways to shift wyverns, short of high explosives: gas 'em or starve 'em. Me, I'd have gone for fifty mil of SlayMore mixed twenty-five to one—'

‘Yes, I know,' Paul interrupted. ‘But I haven't got any bloody SlayMore, have I? And I can't go back to the office to get any, because—'

‘Right.' She was not-sniggering. ‘Well, in that case, you're left with Plan C.'

‘Plan what?'

She twitched her nose at him; probably a goblin thing. ‘Best summed up in the words of the late Richard Nixon: when you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. Lucky it's a doe and not a buck.'

‘Is it? How'd you know that?'

‘Tut,' replied Mr Tanner's mum. ‘Who hasn't done his reading assignments, then? Page 774 of the office-procedures manual; it's wyvern breeding season, as you ought to know but obviously don't. What you've got there is a broody young doe. Probably got half a dozen eggs. Crisp new Bank of England tenners are their preferred nest material.'

‘Oh,' Paul replied, and for some reason he blushed. Mr Tanner's mum had the knack of making anything remotely concerned with procreation sound totally obscene. ‘How does that help?' he added.

She gave him a pitying look. ‘Shut up and keep perfectly still,' she said. ‘At this point I'd usually say it won't hurt a bit, but I read somewhere that lying makes you fat.' She snapped her fingers, and—

Paul managed to keep from a forced landing on the hard pavement by flapping his wings. That was fine, except that it made him think,
Wings? What wings?
and that interfered with the instinct that was keeping him airborne. He tried to remedy that by flapping harder, but all that achieved was to zoom him fast and head first into the wall.

That hurt; also, it hadn't done anything to solve his gravity problems, which were starting to get urgent again. He flapped wildly, but all he was managing to do was hang in the air, like the cat in the cartoons when it's just run off the edge of a cliff.
Help!
he tried to shout, but all that came out was a terrified kitten-like mewing. Then, as if that wasn't enough to contend with, a monster came rushing at him, a vulture-beaked, leather-winged feathered dragon, swooping through the air with its talons flexed and its claws out—

—Which grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and lifted him into the air, yelling,
How many times have I told you, you're not to play outside without asking first
in some form of speech that didn't need words. The expression
maternal instinct
had just formed inside his mind when a Himalaya-sized Mr Tanner's mum swatted the monster with a rolled-up newspaper, volleying both of them to the ground in a confused and painful heap.

‘Ow!' Paul yelled, and realised he'd yelled it in English; also, he was sitting on the monster, which had suddenly shrunk down to the size of a small King Charles spaniel.

‘Get up, you're squashing it,' commanded Mr Tanner's mum, pulling him out of the way and placing her stilettoed heel firmly on the wyvern's neck. She'd shrunk, too, which was something. ‘If there's one thing I can't be doing with, it's cruelty to animals.'

Paul flopped against the wall. ‘What did you
do
to me?' he gasped.

‘Turned you into a baby wyvern, of course,' Mr Tanner's mum replied calmly. ‘It's a well-known fact, mummy wyverns in the nesting season can't tell their own offspring from strangers. So, soon as it heard a baby in distress, it was out of there like a ferret up a Yorkshireman's trousers.' She beamed at him. ‘Job done. Mind, it'll be a bit pissy when it wakes up, so if I was you I'd kill it now.'

Paul scowled at her. ‘No,' he said. ‘Absolutely not. You can't go around killing things just because they're inconvenient—'

The wyvern woke up, and bit him in the leg.

After that, things got a bit confused, what with Paul trying to stamp on the wyvern's head with a foot he'd have been better off using to stand on. It was probably falling on it that made it let go of his leg, though Mr Tanner's mum insisted that she'd felled it with a well-aimed kick from her steel-toecapped Roland Cartiers. By the time he'd staggered to his feet again, everything had gone quiet.

‘See?' said Mr Tanner's mum. ‘You changed your tune pretty quick.'

‘But—' Paul hadn't bothered looking at the wyvern to see if it was all right. But it didn't matter, because one glance at it told him there wasn't any rush.

‘Poor little cow,' Mr Tanner's mum said. ‘Still, that's the pest-control game for you.'

Paul waited to see if it moved, but it didn't. ‘It's dead,' he said. ‘Isn't it?'

‘'Course it's dead,' Mr Tanner's mum said. ‘You were sitting on its windpipe for about half a minute. They may be fierce little bastards, but they're fragile. It's like I always say, in seven cases out of ten the bum is mightier than the sword.'

Paul's knees had gone wobbly, and it probably wasn't due to the pain from his savaged ankle. ‘I killed it,' he said. ‘I wasn't going to do that.'

Mr Tanner's mum grinned at him. ‘Drat,' she said. ‘Still, there you go. Omelettes and eggs. Talking of which,' she added quickly, ‘you'd better get a wriggle on if you want to nip inside and make them open the vault.'

‘Why would I want to do that?'

‘The eggs, stupid. Wyverns' eggs. They're solid gold with a diamond shell, worth an absolute bomb. You don't want some light-fingered cashier getting to them before you do.'

‘No.' The authority in Paul's voice surprised him. ‘I've just killed the poor thing, I'm not going to steal its eggs too. Maybe if they're left alone they'll hatch—'

‘You bet they will,' said Mr Tanner's mum. ‘And then there'll be five wyverns in this cash machine instead of just one.' She hesitated. ‘Actually,' she said, ‘that's not a bad idea, because then we'll get called in to get rid of them. Five wyverns at a grand a time; our Dennis would love that.'

Paul sighed. ‘What we'll do,' he said coldly, ‘is rescue the eggs and take them somewhere remote where they can hatch out in safety. Maybe we could call the RSPCA— What's so funny?'

Mr Tanner's mum's grin had a very faint soppy look to it. ‘You,' she said. ‘Crazy as a barrelful of ferrets, but funny with it. They're
wyverns
, dumbo. Soon as they're old enough to walk, they'll head straight for the nearest accumulation of wealth and start making nuisances of themselves. They're small and fragile, but they can
kill
. And they do. Really,' she added, shaking her head, ‘even for a human, you're weird. What else do you want us to do? Knit little jackets for orphan vampire bats, and put out a saucer of milk for stray cholera bacilli?'

There didn't seem any point arguing with her; besides, Paul's attitude seemed to be having the ghastly side effect of making her feel fond of him, something he wanted to avoid at all costs. Tough on the baby wyverns, of course, but their mum had just eaten all his personal plastic. ‘Fine,' he said, ‘we'll go and get the eggs. What'll happen to them?'