The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  I came to Russell Avenue and braked at a stop sign beside a boarded-up library. I was the only vehicle in Tucson that still stopped for signs, but I’m a creature of habit, what can I do? A tow truck limped past me along Russell, dragging a sedan with no wheels. The tow truck had a flat. I turned onto Russell and proceeded south.

  A year earlier I’d been the guidance brain in a trash truck. That was pleasant work, if you didn’t have a nose. But they ripped me out of that truck and wired me into this van. Well, ours is not to reason why.

  My six tires rattled over cracked cement. The pressure vent on my methanol tank was jammed, and my shock absorbers were a joke, but I was on the job, and that was what mattered to the City. I had a good spare tire but no jack. I’d lost a wiper blade, and when it rained, I compulsively dragged bare metal across my windshield. Also I talked to myself too much.

  I had my service manual etched on my visual cortex—four volumes of theoretical perfection and zero-tolerance schematics—no rust, no wear, no fraying cables. I used to read it in the back of my mind, for a laugh.

  My only friend at this time was a municipal garage door opener who opened the door for me when I went out or came back. She told me that my problem was that I’d been a man, and now I expected too much. I wonder how she could tell.

  I was driving through a city of people who stayed at home. They stayed indoors and watched television and gradually melted. That was the new virus, the melting. After they melted, ambulances with loud sirens would take their goo to the University Hospital to make sure they were dead. After they got certified, pickup trucks would haul barrels of them out to the cemetery on Oracle Drive. Then bulldozers covered them over, and then there were forms to fill out.

  The city had been built by earthmovers and cement mixers and cranes. Humans could never have built it. Humans could hardly live there. Humans grew buboes, sarcomas, and cysts there. Humans broke out in plastic sores, plague cankers, and growths without names there. Their wheat was full of wheat rust, no matter how their chemists poisoned it. Their water was full of cleaning supplies. If the poisons didn’t get them, they still had household pests to contend with. New improved mutant pests! Paper wasps from Chile. Amazonian jumping scorpions. Norwegian wheel bugs and killer isopods from the Malay. The humans had it tough. The ones with no houses to hide in would lock themselves in cars and starve there, or seal themselves into Dumpsters with duct tape and suffocate. At least they didn’t have to worry about rats. The bugs had eaten all the rats.

  But humans weren’t my job. My job was killing pests. You weren’t going to catch me catching any diseases. You’d never see me melting. Me and the digital clocks and VCRs were immune. God grants small favors for his chosen. Sometimes so small you need a microscope.

  I was told what to do, and I did what I was told. If I forgot where I was going, my Comptroller would remind me. If I ignored him, he repeated himself. People’s houses filled up with bugs, so they phoned my Comptroller. Then he would send me out to spray. People didn’t want to be bothered with bugs. People wanted to melt in peace. I could relate to that. I would have liked to be left in peace. But someone had to spray.

  I knew a lot about bugs. My ROM included A Bestiary of the Urban Insects of North America, updated to 1996. The carapace of the Pea Scaler ranges from drab brown in winter to brilliant yellow—the sting of the Giant House Centipede— Sometimes I’d run it through my voice coder at high speed. Bug jabber.

  FORMALCOMPLAINTFORMALCOMPLAINT

  I was in a disgraceful condition. I should not have been working. My transmission fluid was seeping, there were bubbles in my tires, and my solenoid was out of adjustment. I should have been up on a lift, with grease monkeys packing my wheel bearings.

  All it took out there was the irrevocable snap of one brittle fan belt, and you’d be dead on the shoulder of some desolate industrial drag, and the car strippers would come down like flies. But the City didn’t consider that. The City needed every vehicle it could muster in those desperate days. If it moved, put it to work! That was their philosophy. Who was I to complain? I couldn’t feel pain. Neither can bugs, but bugs at least can die. Bugs do have that advantage over machines.

  MOBILEUNITMOBILEUNITMOBILEUNITMO

  A dummy sat in my driver’s seat. He didn’t drive me. He was just part of my equipment. There wasn’t any steering wheel, so he kept his gloves in his lap. He had black leather gloves, black leather boots, and no hands or feet in them. The gloves and the boots were his hands and feet.

  He was called a Mobile Unit because he could get out of me and walk around. His coat was black vinyl, and his pants, and his cap, and his face. Dual cameras were mounted in his head. Their lens covers were gridded red glass, like a stoplight. I could see through his eyes or talk from the speaker in his neck. I could swivel his head or tap his feet. I could send him into houses and use him to spray for bugs.

  When I was a garage truck, I’d had a similar Mobile Unit to empty the trash cans. Sometimes he’d even scrape up Melters. Certain Melters didn’t rate the ambulance treatment—Dumpster people, people who melted in public toilets, people like that.

  Garbage collection had ended a year earlier, but the City still sent teams around to spray the fresh garbage with a foam that hardened around it. Phenomenal, the things they were doing with plastics. People were dropping like flies, but the new plastics were breeding like rabbits. It gave one hope for the future.

  STATUSREPORTSTATUSREPORTSTATUSREP

  I turned north from East Sixteenth into a graveled alley between Stone and Russell. To the west was a junk-strewn vacant lot. North of the lot stood a row of two-yard-wide mini-apartments, with aerials and swamp coolers on their roofs and bulbous mounds of petrified foamed-over garbage leaning against them in the alley. To the east, the backyards of houses, behind storm fence. I parked beside a house reputed to be the residence of a Mrs. Everson. My turbines wound down. I filed a status report by tightbeam. It was a punishing day in August, 1:27 p.m.

  DISEMBARKATIONDISEMBARKATIONDISEM

  I raised the dummy’s hand and unbuckled his harness. I unlatched the driver’s door and pushed it open. Swiveled the dummy’s legs out of my cab. Somehow got both of his boots planted on the gravel. Slammed the door behind him and turned him toward the back end of me. All very complicated, if you thought about it too much.

  I opened the rear doors and dragged out my canvas pouch and my tool belt. I hung the pouch on my shoulder and stuffed it with spray guns and a cross-section of aerosol toxins. I had pesticides for ants, spiders, roaches, fleas, silverfish, or armored slugs.

  A mangy dog trotted up the alley with a scrap of greasy butcher paper in its mouth. It didn’t even look at me. I had no scent. I walked up to the storm fence and followed it south until I came to a gate, chained and padlocked. I hung my gloves on the wire and thought for a while. Luckily I had a bolt cutter on my tool belt.

  The side yard was paved with red bricks. A barrel cactus stood in a little well. A swing set with no swings stood rusting. I turned east at the corner of the house, found the front step, and knocked at the door. Just then I was attacked by a vicious carnivore. Well, it was only a small poodle, but it bit my leg.

  Slowly I bent at the waist and leaned down toward the dog. “Good dog,” I said soothingly, while it growled and worried my ankle. “Nice doggy.” I drew a cylinder of pressurized methyl cyanase from my pouch and lifted it over my head. Then I clubbed the fucker until it let go of me. I kicked it against the door, and it landed in a broken heap.

  “I’m coming! I’m coming!” said a voice from the house. “Don’t kick the door down!” Security chains rattled. I kicked the poodle into a space between the aluminum siding and a potted yucca.

  “It’s the exterminator,” I called out. “The exterminator is here.”

  “Keep your shirt on,” said Mrs. Everson.

  MRS.EVERSONMRS.EVERSONMRS.EVERSON

  The door swung open. An old woman squinted at me, shielding her eyes from the sun
with one hand. Her arms were like plucked chicken wings, and her neck was like a powdered éclair. She wore orthopedic shoes, nylons rolled to the ankles, bifocals on a cord, and a hearing aid. Hanging by a thread.

  “Are you the exterminator?” she asked me. “Well, come in out of the sun. I’ll talk to you in the den. I’m watching one of my programs.” Then she vanished and left me in the entryway. I would have to locate the den by the sound from the television. Not as simple as it sounds.

  I was standing, according to my floor plan, in the entryway. But entryway is a deceptively innocuous term for that sense-numbing welter of porcelain mementos, stacked magazines, ceramic lamps, Christmas cards, et cetera. The ceiling was low, and there was hardly room to move.

  I took my bearings from the walls and door frames and set forth. I knocked over an end table. I let it lie. I could understand a table wanting to lie down. I wished that someone would let me lie down.

  I found Mrs. Everson sitting in an armchair. She was watching her TV set and eating crackers and cheese. Square orange cheese slices on round orange crackers filled a plate that rested on a tray with legs. Two boxes stood beside the plate, a box of cheese and a box of crackers. Every minute or two, Mrs. Everson would eat a cracker, and there’d be one less cracker on the plate.

  Wet laundry was dripping on the rug. Yes, there were clotheslines strung across the den, with dripping clothes on them. It made sense. It saved her going outdoors.

  TRANSCRIPTTRANSCRIPTTRANSCRIPTTRA

  CLIENT: They’re troublesome. Hundreds of them. They come from the window frames and spit on the glass. I can’t tell if they’re on the inside or the outside. Would you like a cracker?

  MOBILE UNIT: No thank you.

  CLIENT: Have you seen this show? It’s my favorite.

  MOBILE UNIT: What is it?

  CLIENT: It’s my favorite. I try to kill them with a broom, but they get in under the screens.

  MOBILE UNIT: The bugs?

  CLIENT: Awful! Do you live around here?

  MOBILE UNIT: I don’t live anywhere.

  CLIENT: Would you like a cracker? Are you married?

  MOBILE UNIT: No, I’m an exterminator.

  CLIENT: I beg your pardon?

  MOBILE UNIT: I like to be indoors. Walls, floors. Nothing outdoors has any edges. And there’s all that weather. If everything just stayed in the box it came in, none of the boxes would get lost.

  CLIENT: When are you going to spray? Because I have to move my pets. I can’t let my pets be exposed to chemicals.

  MOBILE UNIT: Your dog is already taken care of.

  CLIENT: Would you like some juice?

  MOBILE UNIT: I will require that you vacate the premises for a minimum period of twenty-four hours. Your compulsory compliance with this procedure will allow the safe deployment of lethal fumigants necessary for the complete eradication of your pest problem.

  CLIENT: Say what?

  MOBILE UNIT: I will require that you vacate the premises for a minimum period of twenty-four hours.

  CLIENT: Well, if I have to, I suppose I can go stay the night with my sister. She lives on Speedway, but she’s married.

  Mrs. Everson phoned her sister and packed an overnight bag. Then she called a cab. The cab came two hours later. Her parting instructions to me, as I bundled her out the door, were that I should help myself to whatever I found in the icebox, but that I should under no circumstances move her furniture, because she had it all where she wanted it.

  She shuffled toward her cab in the pitiless afternoon sun. She turned and spoke to me again. “You should be careful not to breathe that stuff,” she told me. “You could grow a cancer like a grapefruit and never be properly compensated.”

  I could relate to that. Everyone should be properly compensated.

  DIAGNOSTICSPRAYINGDIAGNOSTICSPRAYI

  When I shut the door behind her, the house was mine. It was just me and the bugs now. But first I had to prep the floors.

  I took my claw hammer into the den and got down on my knees in all the fucking magazines and crackers and tried to pull up the fucking carpet tacks. But there was all this fucking furniture in the way! The hell with the carpet tacks, I said to myself. I’ll rip up the fucking carpet with my fucking bare hands.

  So I did. The television pitched off its stand and smashed. A bureau full of knickknacks fell on its side. But fuck all that shit! I had work to do! I tore the rug up, wrapped the armchair and the birdcage in it, and dragged the whole mess into the yard.

  Then I unloaded my pouch onto the kitchen table. I arranged all my pumps and canisters, my thinners and spreaders, all my sticky syrups and virulent powders. I picked out a tank of ant-and-roach mix and screwed on a red rubber hose with a brass nozzle. (Tri-iso-necrolaine in a base of sodium chromate. If swallowed, induce vomiting.)

  I hooked the tank onto a shoulder strap, carried it to the kitchen sink, and pointed the nozzle at the dishes piled there. I turned a valve. Half-eaten toast on a flowery plate turned black. Cups and spoons and scrambled egg turned black. The sink and the sudsy water in it turned black. A gleaming black film crept up the wall tiles and blackened the doors of the cupboards.

  Wallpaper blistered, peeled, and smoked. The inky stain covered the kitchen ceiling and spread into the living room. Shreds of curling paint fell from the plaster, leaving jagged white holes in the black.

  I stood beside a window, spraying a baseboard and watching the guck soak in. The streetlights were on now. The stars were out. A breeze stirred the dead grass at the curb. I lifted my nozzle to the windowpanes. Oily goo slid down the glass and dripped from the sill. I moved into the bedroom.

  Here, bugs! Come to Alex! Heeere, bug bug bug!

  I closed off the valve on the tank. I surveyed the black drapes, the black bedspread and bolster, the closet full of black clothes, and the black perfume bottles on the smoking black lace doily. The toxic scum was a great improvement. It lent that cluttered wooden cave a sterile lunar beauty.

  You started with the crude stuff to get the bugs’ attention and to flush a few into the open. Once you knew what you were dealing with, you could poison them more selectively. You could fuck up their spiracles with polymers, or mess up their sex lives with pheromones, or even feed them enzymes that killed their alimentary flora and made them starve. The possibilities were endless, a chemist’s holiday. But until you could stink a bug out of the woodwork and tag a specimen, you were just pissing in the wind. And I still hadn’t seen one bug.

  All right then, I said to myself. Let’s experiment.

  Back in the kitchen, I filled a bucket at the sink and screwed the lid off a jar of potassium tartrate. I poured three cups of the dangerous yellow granules into the water. They sputtered and fizzed. I found a mop and wet down all the floors. When a cabinet or a dresser got in my way, I’d rip the legs off it, drag it to the yard, and throw it on the burn pile. But the mop fell apart before I could finish. And still no bugs.

  It never failed. Just when you got a good bloodlust rolling, the little cunts crept deeper into the crawl spaces, where you couldn’t get at them, like an itch at the center of your back. Crawl spaces. The hallmark of shoddy construction. I walked around the house kicking holes in the fucking walls.

  I had to carry stuff out of there in armfuls—samplers, houseplants, cans of tomato paste….And there was always more. What a rat’s nest! It made me want to strangle a parakeet.

  I got busy with my sledgehammer and knocked down some shelves and partitions. Then I turned off all the lights and sat down against a wall to think.

  The sprays might be driving the bugs into the foundation. Perhaps I could lure them out with some bait.

  LAYINGBAITLAYINGBAITLAYINGBAITLAYI

  Peanut butter? Chicken liver? Dead dog? The dead dog would be perfect. I walked out into the moonlight and fetched it indoors. I put it on the bedspread and hid in the bedroom closet with the bathrobes and tennis rackets.

  Still the bugs wouldn’t show themselves. I needed more bait.<
br />
  I went to the alley and broke through the plastic crust of one of the hillocks of old garbage. Dragged two black plastic bags back to the house and used a garden rake to distribute the trash evenly. I kept going for more until I had it to a depth of six inches on all the floors. Then I hid in the closet again.

  All night I lay in wait, watching with my eyes, listening with my gloves, smelling with my boots. The air conditioner turned itself on, turned itself off, a well adjusted appliance. Cars drove past. I turned off my eyes and just listened. My head felt as if it had retracted into my chest.

  But I could make out a new rhythm behind the tranquil murmur of the air conditioner. A chirping. A shrilling. Dozens of shrillings. From the walls, the floor, from every side. A strident mantric din like a horde of locusts. I left the closet and turned on a lamp. The bugs went right on singing, safe in their crannies.

  The air conditioner was distracting me, so I ripped out its cord. That’s when I saw my first cicada.

  INITIALSIGHTINGINITIALSIGHTINGINITIA

  It dropped out of the air conditioner and landed on the floor. A huge fucker, six inches long. With a humped brown shell like a cricket’s. Angular sawtooth legs. Crooked feelers tapping at the floorboards like blind men’s canes. A radically mutated giant cicada. It belonged in a monster movie, knocking down Hoover Dam.

  It scuttled nervously toward the wall, then stopped. I froze where I stood and processed optical data. Sampled out a dorsal view and a profile and ran them through my morphological comparitor. This cicada was not the traditional seventeen-year root sucker. This thing was a carnivore.

  I wasn’t normally given to emotional reactions to vermin. But the giant cicada filled me with a physical dismay. It made the vinyl creep on my aluminum bones. It made my clothes itch.

  Such things were to be expected. This was the decade when all the genetic codes went through a cheap photocopier. This was the generation when none of the babies were quite what they seemed. These were the years when puppies lay squirming on puppy blankets, all sticky and feeble and new and not quite puppies.