Tige had not trampled the kidnapper, who cowered now, gasping, eyes wide, hands in the air as if to ward off the growling behemoth. Tom arrived just as Jim said, “Okay, Tige. Back off. We’ve got him.” Then, with a glance at the kidnapper, he added, “You can have him later.”
Her nostrils flaring at the reek of honeysuckle wine, Muffy Bowen grabbed the man by the neck of his grey coverall and dragged him onto the lawn, dropping him not far from the patch of disturbed soil that marked where Petra had been torn from her place. Tom and Jim joined her, and all three stared down at the villain, scowling. He stared back defiantly, saying nothing, but when Tige moved to let his shadow fall across the group and a drop of canine spittle landed on the ground beside his cheek, his eyes widened with terror.
“One bite,” said Jim Brane. “That’s all it will take. Or maybe two. Tige doesn’t like people who shoot at him. Even when they miss. So talk. Where are your friends taking her?”
“What do they want her for?” put in Tom.
The kidnapper shook his head.
“I bet Randy would like a bite too.” Muffy called. Her spider scuttled across the lawn and climbed her side to perch on her shoulder. The genimal meeped enthusiastically.
The kidnapper trembled, and drops of sweat appeared on his forehead. He had, perhaps, heard of what Randy’s bite had done to the kidnappers in town and at the zoo. But still he said nothing.
Tom thought that they seemed to be playing a game. Their side played threats as pieces. The kidnapper played refusals. The loser was whichever side first ran out of pieces. And now it was his turn to play.
He turned and stepped toward the topsy-turvy house. He found the Slugabed, picked up a broken chair leg, and began to knock glass shards from the window frame through which it protruded. In a moment, Jim was beside him, helping wordlessly. Together, they tugged it through the window, carried it across the lawn, and dropped it beside the kidnapper.
“See how pink the hunger patch is?” asked Tom. He forced eye contact with their captive and pointed. “That means it’s starving. My mother neglected the poor thing. She should have poured some milk on it, or even just dumped some scraps. It’ll digest anything we put on it.”
He was lying when he said anything; it had been designed expressly to leave living matter alone. Jim had been lying too when he promised Tige he could have their prisoner later. But the man obviously had no suspicion of the lies. He shook his head and whimpered: “No.”
“If we squeeze the control node, it’ll wrap around you.” He pointed again. “If we squeeze real hard…”
“I tried that once,” said Kimmer Alvidrez, catching on. “I had to scream for help to get out.”
The kidnapper’s face turned white beneath his dirt. His eyes jerked desperately back and forth. He whimpered again: “No, please.”
Tom gestured, and Jim and Muffy bent to lift the kidnapper onto the Slugabed. He struggled, but a growl from Tige stopped that immediately. When he was in place, Tom knelt and squeezed the control node. The Slugabed obediently folded itself around the captive. He squeezed harder, and the genimal began to shudder and pulse with the motions of massage. He squeezed harder still, using both hands at once, and the Slugabed seemed to grow rigid with contractile effort.
The kidnapper gasped. His face contorted. He shrieked.
He stopped only when he ran out of breath. Then, after a few panting sobs, he began to babble: “Get me out of here. Please! I can’t stand slugs. Or snakes. Or worms! I don’t want it to eat me. Please!”
Ralph Cross joined the small group surrounding the bundled captive. “It…” Like his son, he worked with bioppliances. He too knew their captive was safe. Tom silenced him with a chopping gesture, but the kidnapper did not see. His eyes were shut tight, tears spilling between the lids. His cheeks were no longer pale but flaming red. “Please!”
“We don’t care what your name is,” said Tom. “But why have you people been trying to kidnap us?”
The other shook his head and gasped: “Dunno. Orders. The boss, he said we had a contract. Lots of money.”
Tom was silent for a moment while he digested that tidbit of information. Orders? A contract? Someone was going to a great deal of trouble to capture Muffy, him, his mother. But why?
Finally, he said, “Where are they taking my mother?”
The kidnapper hesitated, the whites of his eyes showing around the edges of a stare that jumped from face to face. Muffy took Randy from her shoulder and set the spider on the cylinder of the Slugabed where the man could stare into the spider’s eight glossy eyes. He shuddered, whined, and said at last, gasping, “Pinkley. There’s a valley…Lonely sp…” Then he closed his eyes and went limp.
Muffy Bowen laughed. “He passed out.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Jim lifted one end of the Slugabed, kidnapper and all. With a nod toward Randy, he said, “Do you think…?”
Muffy caught on immediately. “Of course. Tom, you lift the other end.” When he had done so, Kimmer and Ralph adding their strength to his, she set Randy to crawling around and around the bundle, spinning silk as she went.
She was almost done securing the bundle when they heard the first ululations of police sirens.
“The neighbors must have called,” said Ralph Cross.
Three police Roachsters, their long claws held high, crowded the front lawn. A pair of Sparrowhawks, having disgorged their pilots, perched on the upper curve of the toppled house. The police themselves were busily inspecting the immobilized kidnapper and questioning the witnesses.
One cop was scratching his head over the disturbed soil where Petra had been uprooted. However, no one said a word about what had been happening to Tom’s mother. She was, they all agreed, lying on the lawn, soaking up the sun, when the Bioblimp arrived, seized her in its tentacles, and bore her off. The wreckage? It had seized the house to anchor itself, and when Jim Brane had steered Tige against it, well…There you see the results. And there’s the broken tentacle. The kidnapper tried to shoot the Mack and fell. The gun? There it is, on the lawn. No, we haven’t touched it.
It was all true enough except for the bit about Jim driving Tige to the attack. They had left out a few little details, but those details, they thought, were not important to the police. They had nothing to do with what had happened. And if the kidnapper, once he came to, chose to say that the Mack had attacked on its own, or that Petra had had to be torn out of the soil by the roots…surely the cops would never believe such wild-eyed stories. They simply were not believable, even in a world of rampant gengineering.
Yet there was that officer who had been staring at the ground. When the others had freed the kidnapper from his spider-silk and Slugabed bonds and led him toward the nearest Roachster, he strolled near the house, bent, picked up Petra’s wooden honeysuckle blossom rack, and approached Tom. When he was near enough, he said softly, “She drank a lot of wine, didn’t she?”
Once the police had arrived to take over, Tom had retrieved Freddy. Now, holding the pig in the crook of one arm, he nodded, accepted the rack, saw that it had survived the pumpkin house’s upheaval and its own spill into the yard without a scratch, and tossed it in the direction of the house’s door.
“Did she scream?” A tag upon the cop’s breast said that his name was “Malzer.”
“You sound,” said Muffy Bowen, “like you know.”
It was the cop’s turn to nod. “Yeah,” he said. “Roots. I’ve seen it. If they drink enough, and if they wander off the pavement, or get too close to a pile of rotten garbage. It’s just city compost, you know. Humus. Nature’s effort to rebuild the soil we stripped away when we built the city. And it’s enough to trap the bums.”
Muffy’s face went pale. “I will never,” she said. “I’ll never touch another drop.”
Kimmer Alvidrez stepped up beside Muffy. “Yes,” she said, her face sober. “She screamed.”
“They do,” the cop said. “Though usually it’s BRA who…The cases i
nterest them. They say they’re muck, proof of illegal gengineering, and they want to catch the muckers. So they have to collect the evidence. They dig them up. Pull them out of the dirt. And then they try to collect the people around the victims, too, like family members.”
“What do they do with them all?” asked Muffy.
The cop shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think they have a cure?” asked Tom.
“Or do they let the lab boys take’em apart?” That was Freddy. “I’ll bet that hurts.”
“Do you ever see them again?” asked Ralph Cross. “Can they cure them?”
The cop looked like he was about to answer, but before he could do more than shake his head and open his mouth, someone yelled from one of the Roachsters, “C’mon, Malzer. Move your ass!”
With an apologetic lift of his eyebrows, Malzer turned to leave.
* * *
CHAPTER 11
“Let me,” said Muffy Bowen. She had been behind him, her arms around his shoulders, her cheek laid against his back. Now she stepped around him, held out her hands and bent her fingers invitingly. She was free of her frequent burden, for Randy was roaming around the yard, palping everything she came across and meeping frantically. “I’ll take him.”
With a sigh, Tom Cross let her lift Freddy from his arms. Then, as she and Kimmer Alvidrez and Ralph Cross walked away from him, he kicked again at the rubble that had spilled from the house, his house, the house he had grown up in. He had fled it, yes, when he had felt he did not belong. He had returned, and its occupants had changed, though his parents—at least, his mother—had never left. But she had become a honey bum, grown roots, put roots into her native soil. He laughed. Life played strange jokes. Funniest of all, perhaps, was that he had once thought Ralph was his father, learned the man was not and therefore all love and family were falsely treasonous, and fled. But he had returned, and that love, that acceptance, was still there. He felt ashamed of himself.
He kicked at a tangle of crushed honeysuckle vines. Beside his foot, he saw the honeysuckle rack. Petra Cross would need it no more, even if they got her back. A step ahead lay a book. He turned it with his foot so he could see the title. It was one of his, from before he had run away, an adventure set on a distant planet. They had kept it all these years. He wondered how much of his old stuff lay hidden in the wreckage.
Wreckage and rubble and forgotten impedimenta. What he didn’t have was his mother. He hadn’t visited, but he had always known where she was, that she would surely welcome him if he ever deigned to halt his flight. And she had, when he had come home at last. She had been a drunk, yes, but she had been—she still was—his mother. Just as Ralph was, after all, his father.
When Jim Brane’s hand gripped his shoulder, he wiped the tears from his eyes. His friend’s touch was a reminder of boyhood camaraderie, but it was also what a man offered another man by way of comfort. Two women would have embraced and sobbed their eyes out. “C’mon, Tommy. Tige is out by the road. We found him, remember. We found Muffy. And we’re still a team. Maybe we can find her.”
“Sure,” said Tom. Roots, he thought, and kidnappers, and mysterious masters who issue contracts. “But what will she be by then? What will they do to her? What will they use her to tell us to do?”
Jim had no idea at all of how to answer his friend. He was saying as much with a shrug when they were interrupted. A cry echoed from around the house, a bark, a deep-throated answering yelp. Tom said, “What now?” and the two men began to trot. Tom was thinking of the disaster Tige’s last announcement had portended. He guessed Jim was sharing the thought.
But all that they found was a second Mack, nose to nose with Tige, and sniffing. “Julia!” cried Jim.
She was already swinging down from Blackie’s cab. Behind her Tom could see another figure, shadowed and unrecognizable. As Julia Templeton landed on the grass, she hooked a thumb over her shoulder and said, “He called the Farm, looking for you guys. I was done—the runs were short—so I said I’d bring him.” She looked at Kimmer Alvidrez. “We stopped at your Dad’s place first. He told us…” Then she pointed at the toppled house. “What happened here?”
As Jim Brane began to tell her, the other figure in the Mack’s cab stepped into the doorway. Tom recognized Franklin Peirce and, remembering the museum curator’s gift, fingered the worrystone beneath his shirt. Muffy, standing a few feet away, smiled her own recognition, saw Tom’s movement, and straightened Freddy’s stone.
Jim fell silent. Tom suffered Julia’s sympathetic hug. Peirce said, “Whoever issued that contract must want the whole family. First Muffy, and now your mother. Not to mention you and your friends.”
“It’s as if she was right,” said Tom, with an apologetic glance at Ralph, who was staring at the house, apparently unhearing. “She said it was my real father, Jack. We found out…”
“He,” said Freddy. “He was a fruitcake.”
“You’re why I’m here,” said Peirce. “Porculata wanted me to tell you…”
Tom Cross sighed heavily. There was no point in going on until Peirce had delivered the message: Porculata, it seemed, had had another hot flash from the psychic ether. She had been worried that her husband would want to fool around with strange women, but now she knew. She had instructed Peirce to tell Freddy that it was okay. The ladies couldn’t be deflowered anyway, even if he wanted to. He should feel free to go ahead and try, if he truly wished, though he should know now that it wouldn’t do him a bit of good.
While he recited the message, Randy scuttled toward his ankles, palped his trouser cuffs, and began to climb his leg. When he was done, Peirce shrugged, accepted the spider’s weight in his arms, and added, “I haven’t the foggiest idea of what she is talking about,” and stared at Kimmer as if he were wondering whether she were one of the impregnably undeflowerable ladies Porculata had mentioned. She was a little taller than he.
“Me neither,” said Freddy.
“Nor me,” said Muffy and Tom almost simultaneously. Jim and Kimmer were both silent, while Ralph, who hadn’t seemed to hear a word, grunted, turned away from the house, and said, “Him and his damned plants.”
“Who?” said Peirce.
“Jack,” said Tom. “My real father. He was a gengineer, and…” He filled in what Peirce did not already know. In the process, he introduced Kimmer, who was eying Peirce with as much interest as he was showing in her. For a moment, Tom wondered: Older men were famous for their interest in younger women; those women who returned the interest, however, seemed far more turned on by money and fame, of which Franklin Peirce had neither, than by bald heads. Finally, he said, “I wish I knew what was going on.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” said Peirce.
“Go to Pinkley,” said Kimmer Alvidrez. She was moving closer to the curator.
“I’d like to show you the museum,” said Peirce. Both his eyes and his voice were admiring.
“I bet you’ve got lots of etchings there, right?” She grinned broadly and patted the bare forepart of his scalp. “You even blush up here! But I’m going with them. Maybe later.”
“She’s young enough to be your daughter,” said Julia Templeton.
“So he’s a dirty old man,” said Muffy Bowen. “So’s her father, and you know…”
Ralph Cross turned away from the others to stare at the pumpkin house. To one side, its cradle-like concrete foundation was exposed to the sun. The house itself was tipped, cracked, stove in where its weight had driven one corner of the foundation through its shell. The front door lay open, a ramp leading into the broad slit that once had been a doorway. Ralph shook his head and said, “There’s a map in there somewhere.” He crawled through the opening and disappeared. After a moment during which they could hear him rummaging within, there was a small sound of triumph. When he reemerged, he was holding what looked like a colorfully printed pamphlet.
“Here,” he said, and he unfolded the pamphlet to reveal the map he had
mentioned. “I left footprints on the walls.”
They gathered around. Fingers found their own location, Lake Michigan to the east, and then, on the edge of a long band of hilly terrain, the town of Pinkley. “It’s small,” said Tom.
“Rural,” said Jim Brane. “A good place for a hideout.”
Muffy shifted Freddy’s weight to one arm and spread her free hand across the lake. “But we can’t drive there this afternoon.”
Julia shook her auburn head. “It would take at least a day. Maybe two. “We’ll have to go around.” Her finger traced the greenways past Chicago and through Indiana and up the other side of the lake.
They all looked up from the map as, within the house, the phone rang.
“The wires didn’t break,” said Kimmer.
Ralph searched with his eyes, looking puzzled, and finally pointed. “It rolled on top of them.”
The phone rang again. “The real miracle,” said Peirce, “is that it’s still on the hook. Isn’t someone going to answer it?”
This time, it was Tom Cross who crawled into the house. The others waited silently while he found the phone, stopped its ringing, and said, just loudly enough for them to hear, “What do you mean, you want to talk to us?…Yes, we’ll be here…No, we won’t leave…Yes, sir.”
When he reemerged, he said, “That was BRA, just like that cop was saying. They’ve already got the police report.”
“You didn’t really mean we’d wait for them, did you?” asked Freddy. “They’re already pissed at me, and…”
“None of us wants to wind up in a lab,” said Jim.
Peirce looked puzzled. Muffy told him what Officer Malzer had said.
“I can’t believe…” said the museum curator.
“All they care about is their mechin’ rulebook,” said Freddy. “You heard the way that boob was talking about the kids.”
“But where can we go?” asked Kimmer Alvidrez.
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