The VMR Theory (v1.1) (13 page)

I whispered to Trixie, “Does he talk like this all the time?”

She nodded, playing with the hair on the back of my neck.

“Look, Doc. I’m just your average, garden-variety vamp.”

“You slew tee shadur and expect me to believe t’is?”

“I’d have been in real trouble if Wipo had sicced a couple of CPAs on me.”

“No! You are a channel for power, a doorway t’rough which nameless powers may enter our world, just as it is clear to me t’at vampires are tee secret hand controlling Terra, Mr. MacKay,” Blok said stridently.

“Hey! I resent that!”

“Who governs, t’en? Your legislature and your chief executive? Pishposh! Your legislature is entirely composed of venal hacks, who build day-care centers for whales to atone for past oppression.”

I shrugged. “The civil rights lobby and the tree-huggers are hurting for business.”

“And your chief executive is a middle-aged alcoholic who plays tee xylophone on late night talk shows!” he hissed.

I shrugged. “Democratic government is government by the people and for the people, on the theory that the people ought to get the kind of government they want, good and hard.”

As he was mulling this over, someone knocked sharply on the door and tried to force it.

“Catarina,” I whispered, “if you’re finished powdering, you may want to get out here.”

“Powder corrupts, and absolute powder corrupts absolutely,” Catarina stated as she emerged. “What is it?”

“It is tee police!” Trixie wailed.

Blok threw up his hands in agitation. “T’is is terrible! I cannot be seen wit’ you! I will climb out tee window.”

“We don’t have a window,” Catarina observed.

The police rattled the door and began pounding on it.

“Nice doors. Good dead bolt.” I eyed Blok up and down. “How the heck did the cops know we were in here?”

“Ahh. Er,” Blok responded.

Catarina nodded. Trixie walked over and leaned on his shoulder.

“T’ey were not supposed to be here for anot’er hour!” Blok moaned.

“There’s just no honor among thieves anymore. Is the good doctor in or out?” Catarina asked as the police outside began slamming their shoulders against the door in a rhythmic fashion.

“Who knows?” I shrugged. “Good cop, bad cop?”

Her mouth smiled. “Bad cop. Dr. Blok, do you know what a pinhead is?”

“Yes, of course. I am completely fluent in your childishly simple language,” Blok said dismissively as he walked in circles and wrung his hands in a very human fashion.

“Good. Are you in or out, pinhead?”

“I demand—”

Catarina stuck her hands on her hips. “Ken, we’ve been trying to civilize this planet for seventy-five years, and I say this bunch of warmongers is never going to catch on. We ought to vaporize the place.”

Blok halted, stunned. “What do you mean?”

I tried to ignore the pounding on the door. “Ah, vaporize the place. Not with—the weapon!”

Catarina nodded implacably. “Yes. With—the weapon.”

“But Catarina, that would sweep away the innocent with the guilty. Ah, line.”

She held up five fingers with her left hand and made an O with her right.

“Oh, right. Suppose we could find fifty innocent people on this planet. Rather than wipe it out, couldn’t we spare it for the sake of the innocent fifty?”

Catarina shrugged. “Okay. Fifty innocent people, and we’ll let it ride.”

The pounding stopped for a moment, and Trixie ran over to the door to listen.

The fish was on the hook. “Wait!” Blok waved his arms frantically. “T’ere is my sister’s second husband. T’at only leaves forty-nine.”

“Ah, suppose we find five less than fifty innocent people?”

A lightbulb figuratively began to glow over Trixie’s head. “Bible trivia,” she murmured.

“We did not mean it!” Blok protested. “We can be peaceful!”

“Okay, forty-five it is.”

Trixie interrupted. “Tee police are about to use a bench to break tee door down.”

I nodded. “Right. Let’s speed this up. I hear forty-five innocent people, going once. Do I hear ten?”

Blok held his hand up. “Wait! I can find ten!”

“Catarina, how about if we cut these folks some slack?”

“If you insist.” She stared at Blok. “Look, pinhead. Your species has one more chance. Are you in or out? If you’re in, we’ll get you out of here and you’ll quit screwing around. If not…” She left her sentence unfinished.

“What do you say, Doc?” I coaxed. “As a special favor, we won’t mention the thirty-two nonexistent agents you’ve been billing Admiral Crenshaw for.”

“In,” he sighed. “I place my fate in your hands.”

The telephone rang. Catarina snatched up the receiver. Then she handed it to me. “It’s for you.”

It was Mickey. “Friend Ken, you won’t believe how difficult it was to get hold of you.”

We heard a massive thud, and the door shook.

“Dr. Blok is not tee only one about to be in,” Trixie observed.

“Uh, Mickey, we’re a little bit busy now—”

“I understand completely. However, we are in a bit of a quandary here, and we elected to solicit your sagacious advice. We sold considerable portions of our companies back to the employees—’bind not the mouths of the kine,’ as Bunkie put it so eloquently—and now find ourselves in a disadvantageous corporate tax situation. Miss Gwen suggested that we might want to sponsor a television program—”

The pounding increased.

“Do you consider this a wise venture?”

“Sounds great. Need to run! Bye!” I slammed the phone down. “Any ideas?” I asked Catarina.

She took me by the arm and moved next to the door. “Ken, we have no choice. We have to use the death ray,” she said in a loud voice.

I blinked at her. “The death what? Ouch! That was my foot you stepped on. Ah, yes. The death ray. Yes, we must use the death ray. We have no choice.”

“Translate for them, Trixie—Blok, I don’t want to hear a peep out of you,” Catarina said quietly, handing them breathing masks from her belt pouch and uncorking what looked like a gas grenade.

Trixie burst into a freehand translation as Blok sensibly dove under the bed.

“But Ken, the death ray is so cruel a weapon to employ!” Catarina declaimed.

The ramming outside lost some of its rhythm.

“Ah, we will make it up to the widows and orphans someday, but the peace of the galaxy is at stake!” I responded, striking an appropriate pose. As Trixie translated, Catarina wedged a sputtering gas grenade against the bottom of the door.

The ramming stopped. I jerked Catarina out of the way as two or three Special Secret Policemen emptied the magazines of their submachine guns through the door. Then we heard a couple of cops drop, and footsteps as the remaining gendarmes pounded down the steps.

“Grab Blok!” Catarina directed, opening the door and scooping up a weapon and some spare clips.

I fished Blok out of his hole, and then Trixie and I followed Catarina down the steps, which ended in a small landing. “Maybe they’re all gone,” I said hopefully.

Catarina plucked the porkpie hat off Blok’s head. Swinging open the door, she cautiously extended Blok’s hat from the end of her submachine gun. A burst of gunfire knocked it away and riddled the back wall, breaking glass on the far side.

Blok gasped and hit the deck, muttering imprecations, while the people inside the tavern pounded on the wall and shouted. “Tee hat cost plenty,” Trixie translated, “and tee tavern owner is telling us to knock it off.”

With Blok clutching my left ankle, I found my movements hampered, so I leaned against the wall to scrape him off. “What now?”

“This requires thought,” Catarina conceded. “About how many cops do we have out there, do you think?” Another torrent of submachine gun fire came pouring through the open door and shot out the lighting.

“Five or six,” I guessed as little pieces of tile and plaster bounced off my head.

Having led a dull life prior to meeting us, Trixie squealed, “T’is is so exciting!”

Catarina suddenly snapped her fingers. “Ken, give me all the local currency you’re carrying.”

I pulled a couple of wads out of my belt pouch and forked it over. Catarina combined it with what she was carrying. Another two or three quick bursts of submachine gun fire cut through the doorway. “Tee people inside are becoming very annoyed,” Trixie informed us.

Some of the gunfire was beginning to come from inside the building, which suggested that the people inside were becoming very annoyed indeed.

Catarina reached down and pulled Blok to his feet. “Where are you parked?”

Blok swallowed like a frog downing dinner and described the location.

“Good.” She leaned over to judge the arc of the streetlights and began pitching bank notes into the parking lot.

Two cops emptied magazines at the disturbance. “Do you really think this is going to work?” I asked. “On the planets we frequent, I can’t actually recall running into an honest cop, but there’s always a first time.”

Catarina’s teeth sparkled in the starlight. “These boys have been pretty nervous. How much ammo do you think they have left?”

“Point taken.”

The breeze outside was fairly stiff. The submachine gun fire suddenly stopped as the money began drifting downwind. It collectively took the cops about three seconds to recognize and react, and then it was like a January White Sale.

As the patter of little gray feet disappeared, I covered Catarina from the doorway as she cautiously waved Trixie’s scarf. Then she darted outside, flattened, and rolled behind a Dumpster. A few seconds later she waved us on.

We ran to Blok’s car, which was parked about a block away. Catarina and I got in back and crouched down while Trixie sat in front with a borrowed submachine gun in case we ran into problems or Blok had second thoughts—the good doctor obviously thought that his car was about to ferry plutonium, and he wasn’t very happy about it.

A noisy crowd was already beginning to gather in front of the tavern as we drove by. “Tee people are very displeased. Tee stairway backed on to tee wine rack,” Trixie observed.

Catarina touched my cheek. “You don’t look happy.”

“I’m getting used to being shot at,” I whispered back, “and that’s frightening.”

A new wave of police began arriving, and the crowd showed signs of hostility. A stray bottle took out the rear window on Catarina’s side as Blok, oozing profusely, moved us smartly away from the scene. Suddenly he wailed, “Tee police are looking for all of us including me! It is on tee radio! Oh, no! All is lost!” Carping about the injustice of it all, he bounced the car off a pothole and I suddenly remembered that I was still in need of a good chiropractor.

I commented to Catarina, “Sometime soon, I’d like an opportunity to get in touch with my feelings.”

“I take it you feel like killing Dr. Blok.”

“There are too many mind-readers in this crowd.” Catarina reached over and began rubbing the sore spot. “Relax. Think gentle thoughts. Think of the look on Lydia’s face when we hand her your expense account.”

“What’s our next move? I’d hate to get Mjarlen into trouble.”

“Where is the last place they’d think of looking for us?”

“The embassy?”

She nodded.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the ambassador wants to turn me in, and the PCJE wants to take a scalpel to my hide. Also, at a guess, between the Secret Police and the Marines manning the gates, getting in ranks as a two point six degree of difficulty.”

She smiled and patted my cheek. “It’s in the bag.” She gave Blok directions, put her head on my knee, and fell asleep.

As we neared the compound I had Blok circle the block while I cautiously raised my head high enough to peer out. Special Secret Policemen, recognizable by their trench coats and general air of insouciance, were thick on the ground. As we turned a comer I spied a small and obviously nervous Macdonald female in a dark beret sitting on top of an oversized garment bag.

“Oh, heck,” I murmured, “slow down.”

“What is it?” Trixie asked.

“I recognize her,” I sighed, “and the garment bag is a friend of mine.”

Blok drifted to a stop, and I rolled down the window. “Psst. Muffy! Harry?”

Harry unzipped. “Ken! How the hell are you? Catarina said that you’d be by. Hey, stop it, honey! That tickles.” Muffy jumped down, clicked her heels together, and gave us a stirring exhortation in what was intended to be English.

Apparently, she had taught herself the language from one of those trendy little dictionaries which list words like “womyn” and “herstory.” I caught the part about “the struggle to focus on processes and trajectories to cross gender-defined subject-boundaries in order to repudiate eviscerating gender-determined cultural oppression and avoid being trapped in a cultural-historical pre-processual paradigm,” and I formed a mental image of the ghost of Noah Webster dropping his lunch in a small New England cemetery.

“Sure, whatever you say, honey.” Harry, who obviously didn’t realize that she was speaking English, waved his hand nonchalantly. “Right now, I’ve got to talk to Ken.”

“Can the two of you get us inside?” I asked.

“No sweat. The cops are greased.”

“Are they going to
stay
greased?”

Harry nodded vigorously. “I offered them some of Bunkie’s dresses for their wives, and they got to get us in if they want to collect. They even gave us a group discount.”

“What about the Marines?”

“Hey, they’re good Joes, and those PCJE women are
ugly.”

Blok had been hanging on to my sleeve in an effort to gain my attention. “Do you know what she is?” he hissed with a horrified look on his face.

Harry’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s the pipsqueak, Ken?”

“Oh, yeah. Let me do introductions.” I gestured. “Harry Halsey and Muffy, this is Dr. Blok and Trixie.”

“Charmed, I am sure,” Blok said stiffly.

“Harry is our, ah, supercargo. He used to own a bar on Schuyler’s World, next to the morgue.”

Harry corrected me. “It was Jake’s funeral parlor, Ken. Their advertising jingle was, ‘Coffins, all sizes and models—have we got the shape for the shape you’re in!’ Hey, did you ever check out their gift shop? They had personalized toe tags.”