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.”
“Harry, Ken has told me so much about you,” Trixie said, batting her eyes. Muffy gave her a look of absolute hostility.
I looked around nervously as Catarina began to stir. “I don’t mean to rush everyone, but can we go in?”
We tipped the cops who waved us through, and after Muffy disabled the alarms, we entered the embassy through the window to my room. I kept expecting to see the embassy security detail waiting for us with a bill for damages.
Catarina took charge. “We might as well call it a night. Ken, why don’t you and Harry keep an eye on Dr. Blok. I’ll take Muffy and Trixie with me. We’ll tackle Ambassador Meisenhelder in the morning after he’s had his coffee.”
Harry and I fixed the window, and then we rolled to see who got the bed. Unfortunately, we used Harry’s dice, which meant that Blok got the sofa and I got what the littlest piggy got. After I switched off the lights and tried to fall asleep, I was awakened by a tug on my blanket.
“Mr. MacKay!” Blok gave my blanket another pull. “Are you asleep?”
“No.” The problem
with suffering fools gladly is that they don’t suffer nearly as much as you do.
“You must know—t’is female who calls herself Muffy! She is a dangerous radical who wishes to upset tee ordering of society!”
“Thanks. See you in the morning.”
He gave me a soulful look. “Oh, what will become of me!”
“Cheer up. Lydia will find you a new career.”
“You t’ink so?”
“Sure. It will probably be the same one she offered me, which is painting those little yellow lines down the center of busy freeways.”
“I feel better.”
“Great. I’m glad one of us does. Good night.”
I should mention that Harry snores.
Around six Catarina came by to collect us. Muffy had a basket of moderately active invertebrates to feed Blok and Trixie; the rest of us headed for the embassy dining room. I whispered to Catarina, “Did you tell Harry that Muffy is a radical feminist?”
She shook her head. “Ignorance is a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”
The embassy dining room was mostly empty when we arrived. Harry went for the sausage and powdered eggs. Catarina and I opted for cereal of dubious provenance— “Bran X,” as Catarina dubbed it—and mugs of cocoa, chocolate being one of the four food groups.
A few tables over, a crew-cut woman from Feline Liberation Front noticed us. I saw her push aside her breakfast salad and grab a chubby guy from the Save the Gerbils Foundation so hard that he almost spilled his mineral water.
“Are your ears burning?” Catarina asked me.
“I’ll handle this,” Harry sniffed.
The woman marched over to our table, narrowing her closely spaced eyes. “I’m Wild. Felicia Wild of the PCJE. I’m looking for a man named Ken MacKay.” Harry stood. “Hey, babe, you’re wasting your time. He’s already got a girlfriend. My name’s Harry.”
One of the buttons Wild was wearing read “Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat Meat.” She stared at Harry’s plate, where a greasy sausage was dripping on the end of the fork we made him use. “I’d rather fornicate with a goat than eat the meat of a slaughtered, defenseless animal.”
I cringed.
Harry looked down at his plate and back again. “I didn’t know I got a choice, today. Your place or mine?” The woman’s mouth and chest moved, but no sound came out. She had that stricken look you sometimes see on the faces of small animals crossing against traffic.
“I’ll bring the oil,” Harry offered.
The cat lady whimpered and ran.
Harry sat back down, speared his sausage, and munched on it enthusiastically. “You know, I bet I could really get a rise out of her if I came back tomorrow, but then I’d miss the bomb.”
I almost choked on my cocoa. “What bomb?” Catarina asked in a very faint voice.
“What was it we were going to blow up? Oh, yeah, at the capitol building. You know, with the parliament inside?”
I whispered a quick prayer. “Uh, Harry, was it a— teeny-weeny little bomb, or a big bomb?”
“Oh, a big one.” Harry used the sugar bowl to demonstrate. “A dust initiator. You remember when Prince Adolf was shooting missiles at the Scupper and you tried to touch off a cloud of fertilizer?”
“Well, yes. You only made me tell you the story forty-seven times.”
“When I told all of Muffy’s little friends about it, they got real excited.”
I stared at Harry. “Oh, no.”
To initiate a dust explosion, you mix powdered TNT with an incendiary—preferably three parts powdered ferric oxide to two parts powdered aluminum or magnesium—and use it to touch off a “surround,” which is a fine powder or volatilized gasoline evenly distributed in the air. A kilo of explosive and forty kilos of surround is good for about thirteen hundred cubic meters of building, which makes it a nice way to get a big bang out of a limited amount of explosive.
“We pumped about half a ton of fertilizer into the building and used the air conditioners to swirl it around,” Harry said complacently. “That was what we needed the demo charges from the ship for. Oh, yeah, Muffy wanted me to thank you, Ken. You know, we couldn’t have done it without you.”
Harry finished mopping up his eggs and pushed his plate away. He looked at us with concern. “Are you all right, Ken? You’re looking kind of pale—I mean, even more pale than usual. In fact, you and Catarina are both looking paler than usual.”
Catarina purred, “Ken, we need to talk.”
“Harry,” I interjected, “are you saying the guards just let you drive right up to the capital and pour in a truckload of fertilizer?”
Harry looked perplexed. “Hey, they’re civil servants. They were on their coffee break. Union rules.”
“Didn’t anybody ask why you were pumping a half ton of manure into the building?”
Harry lifted his hand to his forehead. “Not that I remember. Well, one guy said that pumping manure into the capital was redundant, but I think he was making a joke.”
“Harry,” I said desperately, “I know you’re trying to help Muffy with her revolution, but don’t you think that this might annoy people?”
He scratched his head. “You know, I asked Muffy about that, and she said that they did a telephone survey, and sixty-six percent of the people surveyed volunteered to push the plunger.”
Catarina shook her head sadly. “Harry, when is the explosion timed to go off?”
“Tomorrow morning. Muffy says that the legislature has a ceremonial opening session where the legislators put on fancy robes and fling coins to the crowd while the crowd flings back road apples. We timed it so that the building blows up right when they open the doors.” Catarina stared up at the ceiling. “You do know that commercial explosives have little colored bits of plastic mixed in with the inert material so that people can identify the batch and lot number from the residue.”
Harry appeared to digest this bit of information. “Is this a problem?”
“Harry, she’s saying that after the explosion, the Macdonalds are going to know that the demo charges came off our ship,” I explained.
Harry’s brow furrowed in deep concentration. “Well, okay, but is this a problem?”
“It means that we’ll have an awful lot of explaining to do,” Catarina said, looking at me. “By linking us to the blast, the Macdonalds could use it to squeeze concessions out of the Confederation which would allow them to build up their warfleet. Alternatively, if they think they’re ready to start a war, they would be hard-pressed to find a better casus belli.”
“Is that some kind of spaghetti dish?” Harry inquired.
I looked at Catarina. “I guess maybe we don’t want to talk to the ambassador just now.”
“Maybe not.” She pulled the sunglasses off her face, stuck one of the earpieces in her mouth, and smiled, a real jet job. “Ken, it’s a little late to ask, but why did you let Harry have demo charges?”
“I didn’t actually think the Macdonalds would let him have them.”
She began examining her fingernails. “Ken?”
“Yes, I know. It is inappropriate to use mass extermination to settle petty grievances. Are you mad at me?”
“That would be an understatement.”
Harry looked at each of us in turn. “Is something wrong?”
Catarina sighed. “Harry, we’re going to have pull out those demo charges and stop the explosion.”
“Aw, dam!” Harry lightly tapped his fist against the table to express his feelings, leaving behind a small dent.
I winced. “Couldn’t we just make an anonymous phone call and tell them about the bomb?”
“The only thing easier to trace than the residue from the charges would be the serial numbers. Harry, do you know where the charges are planted?”
“No, they said that I was too conspicuous to take along. Muffy knows.” He scratched his head. “She said that they were going to booby-trap the charges to keep anyone from tampering with them.
Is that a problem?”
“It’s a problem,” Catarina agreed. “Ken, do you know anything about defusing bombs?”
“I was about to ask you the same question.”
She shrugged. “We’d better plan on leaving as soon as it gets dark. I’ll see if there’s an ordnance expert on the staff here who is willing to come along without making it a matter of official record. Harry, I need you to break the news to Muffy and get her to help.”
“She had her heart set on this,” Harry observed sadly. Mentioning the word “heart” around Catarina is like waving a red cape, but she turned the corner of her mouth down with barely a glimmer of her usual enthusiasm. “I wish the two of you had nipped this in the blood, but I suppose into everyone’s life, a little vein must fall.”
“She’s real upset,” Harry noted somberly. “Oops! Don’t look now.”
Bobby Stemm advanced into the room like Frank Clanton walking into the O.K. Corral. He pointed one finger menacingly. “You!”
I looked around.
“MacKay! What are you doing here?!”
I shrugged. “There’s this thing called breakfast.”
“Where did you come from? How did you get in here?”
Catarina said in a stage whisper, “I’ll explain doors if you’ll tell him about the birds and the bees.”
Accurately reading the expression on her face, Bobby stepped back a pace.
“Shall, we continue this discussion in your office?” she said politely.
Leaving Harry behind to finish breakfast, we marched off to Bobby’s office. As soon as we got inside, Catarina slammed the door shut. “Bobby, to put this in concrete terms, let me be the first to assure you that if the ambassador boots us and bollixes up our mission, Admiral Crenshaw is going to ensure that your next duty station is cold and lonely.”
Bobby considered this. He began banging his head on his desk. “My career is already in ruins. Aren’t the two of you satisfied?”
Catarina and I looked at each other. “No.”
“It’s not fair,” he sobbed.
Catarina sniffed the air cautiously. “What’s that I smell?”
The VMR Theory (v1.1) Page 11
