What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World

by Henry Clark

  “SILENCE! The most important project in the history of the Disin Corporation and I find out, almost too late, that security has been compromised. It sounds to me as if anybody with the guts to walk across Hellsboro could just come strolling in here.”

  Again, the wolf seemed to look right at us. I wondered how noticeable my twitching had been. Then he shook his shaggy head and turned his attention to Bald Guy. “And speaking of security, Shepherd, back when you were in charge of it, before your demotion, you sabotaged the brakes on the car of a man and a woman, both of whom I had hoped to convince to join the organization. You acted prematurely.”

  “They were a serious threat—”

  “I WAS HANDLING IT!”

  “But that was so long ago—”

  “That’s the thing about me. I never forget. You were all competent enough to get by, but sooner or later, there had to be a day of reckoning. This is it.” The wolf waved his cigar at them. “Can any of you tell me what one of the least talked-about attributes of a werewolf is?” He looked at each of them in turn. “Class?”

  None of them said a thing. They were probably thinking he had gone insane. That’s what I was thinking.

  “I mean, besides the tearing out of victims’ throats, and the eating of victims’ entrails, and the handcuffing of itself to a radiator pipe when it doesn’t feel like going out for the night? Anyone? No? Then I’ll tell you.”

  The wolf put the cigar to his lips. Then he said, “They are notorious for passing gas!”

  He inhaled mightily on his cigar. He held his breath for a moment, then exhaled a cloud of smoke that completely filled the lower half of the TV screen. From beneath the underside of the TV, into the room, came a smoky, hissing billow of yellowish-purple gas. It was the color, I imagined, that a rutabaga crayon might be.

  The five seated people jumped to their feet. Dalmatian turned and reached for the suit I was wearing. She no sooner stretched out her hand than she fell to the floor and began to convulse. Bernese pitched forward onto the table, quivered, and was still.

  Shepherd took two steps toward the door, then fell. Coyote tripped over him and collapsed. Doberman, who was the closest to the door, managed to push the button to open it, but he could only cling briefly to the door frame before sliding slowly down to the floor.

  All five of them twitched once or twice. Then nobody moved.

  The wolf surveyed the scene from his TV. Then he extended a claw out from the screen. It seemed to hover in the air an inch from my nose. What would have been the claw’s index finger, had it been a human hand, curled up and wiggled a couple of times, making the universal hand signal for come here.

  The wolf whispered, “Why don’t the three of you step forward so I can see you better?”

  CHAPTER

  15

  Never Moon a Werewolf

  none of us moved.

  “Come, come,” said the wolf. “I won’t bite. I know there are three of you, no matter how motionless two of you thought you were being.”

  Freak squared his shoulders and took a step forward. I shrugged myself off my peg and joined him. After a moment, Fiona came up beside me.

  “That’s better,” said the wolf. “I see all four of us have come masked to the ball. I suppose introducing ourselves would make it less romantic. You can, however, remove your helmets. The door has been open long enough for the gas to have dissipated.”

  None of us made a move to undo our helmets. Freak turned his head to look at the door.

  “I wouldn’t think of running for it,” the wolf informed us. “You would not get far.”

  “How could you stop us?” Fiona surprised me by saying. Her voice was muffled by the suit. She sounded like an older version of herself with a head cold. “You’re not even on the same continent as we are.”

  The wolf’s eyes narrowed. “And how would you know that?”

  “Every time you reply to somebody, there’s a brief pause before you speak. It’s obvious the TV signal is being bounced off a satellite to someplace far away.”

  “Yes!” shouted the wolf. “Exactly! That’s the sort of thinking that none of the five people lying at your feet ever seemed to exhibit. How I miss that. I believe it’s called intelligence.”

  “Are they dead?” asked Freak, with a stillness in his tone I had never heard before. He sounded older than he was, too.

  “Dead? Who? Them? No. Not technically. What kind of man do you take me for?”

  “A big hairy one with enormous claws and fangs,” I said.

  “What? Oh. You mean the avatar. It might interest you to know the avatar software monitors my heart rate and blood pressure. It’s only when those things go up that the wolf appears. We have a saying where I come from: ‘Never moon a werewolf.’ Actually, I just made that saying up, since, where I come from, we don’t have a moon. It’s a werewolf-free zone. Anyway, each of the people at your feet had mooned me. They had offended me. They brought out the wolf, and look what happened. They’re not dead, though.”

  Fiona screamed.

  Coyote had grabbed her by the ankle. He was lying on his back looking up at her, drool running down one side of his face. Fiona yanked her ankle away and Coyote rolled over on his side and gurgled. The other four bodies showed faint signs of life.

  “What mnemocide gas does,” explained the wolf, “is cause the brain’s synapses to fire all at once, in one huge burst. The result is like an electromagnetic pulse near a computer. It wipes the memory completely clean. Their personalities, their memories—everything they were, except for some basic motor skills—are gone. They become clean slates.”

  “Will their memories come back?” demanded Freak.

  “Never.”

  “Then how,” said Freak slowly, “is that different from being dead?”

  “It isn’t. Not if you want to get philosophical about it. But it does leave me with five fully grown live bodies.”

  “For what? To work in your shipyards?”

  “They would be wasted in the shipyards. I have something better in mind for these five. A little later, they will be taken to the room next door and put into revivariums, and entirely new personalities will be downloaded into their skulls. Personalities of people I know I can trust.”

  “Are revivariums big metal pipes?” asked Fiona. “In a room that really should have toilets?”

  The wolf’s features had been slowly changing as he spoke. The snout had receded, the hair had shortened; he had, over the course of a minute or two, become a bulldog again. At Fiona’s question, his eyes briefly flashed red, but then went back to a gentler doggie-brown.

  “Have the three of you,” the bulldog inquired, “managed to snoop into every room of this place?”

  “We get around,” I assured him.

  Bernese, who had been crawling along the top of the conference table, reached the edge and fell off. Shepherd started saying something that sounded like “ga” over and over again, very softly. Something shivery ran up and down my spine. I was pretty sure it wasn’t the mouse.

  “We really have to get going,” Freak announced, some of the old fire returning to his voice. “You wouldn’t be telling us these things if you thought we were ever going to get out of here. I’m guessing somebody is on their way.”

  We tensed to make a run for it.

  “I can close the door before you can get to it,” said the wolf. “Even with the satellite delay. I have the button right in front of me. Obviously, none of you has ever tried to run while wearing a hazmat suit. The only reason I haven’t closed it yet is because the lighting is better in this room with the door open. I was really hoping to see your faces before we finished our conversation. Take the suits off. If you do run, you’ll be able to run faster without them.”

  “Do not take off the suits,” said a new voice, which for a moment I thought might have come from the mouse. It wouldn’t have been the strangest thing that had happened lately. Then I realized the voice sounded vaguely familiar. It did
n’t belong to the bulldog. It certainly didn’t belong to any of the five unfortunate creatures at our feet. The mouse was still in the helmet with me, and I could see it wasn’t talking. The voice seemed, in fact, to be coming from the direction of my pants. I wondered about the oven mitts.

  “There is still enough gas remaining in the room to be harmful,” cautioned the voice. I realized it was the same mysterious voice that had said “Bravo” on the school bus and “Well done” near the sinkhole.

  “Is one of you a ventriloquist?” asked the bulldog. “If you are, you’re very good. I can’t see your lips move. Oh, wait. That’s because I can’t see your lips. Why don’t you take off your helmets?” The way he expressed himself, I realized, reminded me an awful lot of Alf.

  “He has signaled for help,” continued the voice from my pants. “But this is a big place, with a skeleton crew. His help is at least five minutes away. I will let you know when to run.”

  “Unless, of course, you’re some sort of trick he’s playing on us,” Freak pointed out. I found it reassuring that it wasn’t just the bulldog and me hearing the voice.

  “There is no way I can prove that I am not,” acknowledged the voice. “You will have to use your own judgment. You will have to decide, from the evidence, whom you can trust.”

  “So, we have one more individual not showing his face,” observed the bulldog. “I do like it when a party has a theme.”

  “Edward Disin, you must be stopped!” declared the voice, very authoritatively. I liked the way my pants had decided to stand up to him.

  “I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced.” The bulldog’s eyes reddened and his hair darkened.

  “You and I have met before, Edward Disin. During your conquest of Indorsia. The moment you chose to use atomic weapons, I became aware of you.” The voice was still coming from my pants. I tried to remember what I had in my pockets.

  “It took atomic weapons to get your attention? You must be a very sound sleeper.” The avatar couldn’t decide whether to be wolf or bulldog.

  “What happened in Indorsia must not happen here.”

  “Atomic weapons were a mistake,” agreed the bulldog. “I’ve got two whole continents where the property values are completely in the toilet. But that, of course, leaves fourteen continents where everything is fine. I was under the impression there were only two people anywhere on Earth from Indorsia. One of them is myself. The other is my boneheaded son. You wouldn’t happen to be him, would you? I can’t imagine who else would know the things you know.”

  “You assume I am a person.”

  I could feel a faint vibration in my left pants pocket every time the voice made itself heard. All I could remember putting in that pocket was my house key. My house key hadn’t spoken in all the six years I had been keeping it there.

  “Now you’ve really got my interest,” said Edward Disin’s avatar.

  “Good,” said the voice. “I wanted your attention. I have a message for you.”

  The bulldog leaned forward, out of the television screen.

  “The message is this,” said the voice. “Miranda still lives!”

  The cigar fell out of the bulldog’s lips. It started to drop into the room. It fell below the level of the TV screen and vanished. The bulldog became a firework that exploded into bristling hair, angry eyes, and a muzzle full of long, incredibly sharp teeth. It lunged as far out of the screen as it possibly could. I was certain I could feel its hot breath on my face.

  “Now would be a good time to run,” said the voice.

  We turned and tried to bolt for the door. It turned out to be impossible to run in the hazmat suits. All three of us kept tripping over the excess material in the legs. I watched as the door started to slide shut. I knew we weren’t going to make it.

  The door slid smoothly until it came within a foot of closing. Doberman was lying on his back with his head in the doorway. The door hummed as it tried to get past the obstruction. I realized the conference table had been blocking Edward Disin’s view of the floor.

  The door slid back open six inches and then tried to close again several times. Each time, it struck Doberman squarely on the temple. Doberman stared wide-eyed at the ceiling and said, “Ook,” each time he was hit.

  “Come back here!” roared Disin as Fiona turned sideways, stepped over Doberman, and let herself out. Freak quickly followed her.

  “You won’t get far!” shouted Disin. “Jackal is out there!”

  I got one foot out on the balcony, then turned midway through my exit and looked back into the room. I pointed down at Doberman, who was still acting as a doorstop.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have called him a blockhead,” I said.

  Disin roared, and a new, apparently involuntary burst of gas billowed out from under the TV, as if the avatar software also monitored his bowels. Freak and Fiona pulled me out of the room.

  We had just mooned the biggest werewolf ever.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Double Six

  Go right,” said my pants.

  “That’s a dead end,” said Freak.

  “The last room on the right has an elevator at the back.”

  I looked nervously to the left, expecting to see Jackal, and perhaps an entire pack of doghats, emerging from the stairwell.

  “Let’s not argue with my pants,” I said.

  We went right.

  We galumphed along in our hazmat suits until we reached the door marked SERVICE, just before the shimmering wall of ice, and pushed our way inside.

  The room was full of crates and boxes stacked high on wooden pallets. The freight elevator at the back of the room was nearly hidden by one of the stacks.

  “You have time to ditch the suits,” said the mysterious voice. “You will be able to move faster if you do. Hide the suits behind the boxes. You don’t want to leave a trail.”

  We didn’t need much urging. We eagerly broke the Velcro-like seals of the suits, lifted the helmets off, and peeled ourselves like bananas. I found my friend the mouse and made sure he got out. He scurried along the floor and disappeared among the boxes.

  “Do you believe that?” said Fiona. “He turned those people into slugs!”

  “I have no trouble believing it,” said Freak, adjusting his shirt and pushing his hair back out of his face. We had all gotten sweaty in the suits. “The man’s a monster.”

  “Shh!” The voice was louder and clearer than it had been, now that I was out of the suit.

  “You just hissed in your pants,” said Freak.

  “Keep your voices down!” the voice instructed. “They’ll be here any minute. Would you please get into the elevator?”

  The elevator door was invitingly open, and its walls were hung with thick, quilted blankets. It looked like a padded cell. As we entered, I stuck my hand into the left front pocket of my jeans and pulled everything out: my house key, a stick of gum, and the double-six domino.

  “Push three,” said the domino.

  “Push three what?” I said, as if I had been talking to dominoes all my life.

  “Push three on the elevator control panel!”

  Freak jabbed his thumb against the topmost button. The elevator doors closed. The elevator lurched slowly upward, as if it didn’t want to go.

  “So,” I said. “You’re a domino.”

  “I am a tracking device. Alf thought it would be helpful if he could know where you were at all times.”

  “Me?”

  “You and the other two. You’re a team, you know.”

  I looked smugly at Freak and Fiona. Freak scowled. Fiona looked thoughtful.

  “So Alf knows where we are right now?” I asked.

  “No. He does not. I have chosen not to tell him. He thinks you’re at home on Bagshot Road.”

  “So… you’re not a very good tracking device.”

  “I am a tracking device that exceeds the parameters of Alf’s original design. I am a tracking device that thinks for
itself. The nannies in the sofa’s armrests constructed me with two-way communication capability and a wider range of sensing devices, things that were not in Alf’s original schematic. They also upped me from a double-five to a double-six. Alf’s designs are sometimes too conservative.”

  “You’re Guernica,” I said.

  “Mainly.”

  “Mainly?”

  “There is a second intelligence here with me. For the present, she chooses to observe and not communicate.”

  “She?” said Fiona.

  “Her name is Miranda. She was a brilliant strategist and Edward Disin’s greatest opponent in the war for Indorsia. At one point, she almost defeated him. Then he captured her and had her publicly executed. Before she died, however, Alf was able to download her mind into a nonorganic storage medium. When he fled here to Earth, he brought her with him and stored her mind in the sofa. Alf hopes someday to put her mind back into a flesh-and-blood body.”

  “Like mine?” snapped Fiona.

  “She’d prefer one with better hand-eye coordination. Ultimately, a body grown from cells from her original body. Fortunately, some of those cells still exist. Her father was sentimental enough to have kept her head.”

  “Her father?”

  “Her father, and Alf’s father. Alf and Miranda are brother and sister. Their father is Edward Disin. This is your floor.” The elevator doors groaned open. “You want to get to the roof. The stairwell is to your right.”

  None of us moved.

  “I know,” said the domino. “It’s overwhelming. Be overwhelmed later. You have to get going!”

  Freak and I scrambled from the elevator, but Fiona hung back. “L is for Lobby, right?” she said. She punched a button and hopped out after us.

  “Let them look for us there,” Fiona explained as the groan of the elevator faded away.

  “That,” said Double Six, “was a brilliant piece of strategy. Miranda approves. Now it’s important you get to the roof.”