Gascoyne Read online

  “You think it’s that way?”

  “Indeed I do GASCOYNE. These wars are frightful things.” He keeps tossing the cage back and forth and then stops. “You see here one of our most recent failures.”

  “Oh?”

  “You see here inside a female Latrodectus mactans, commonly known as the black widow spider, which of course we have succeeded in making far more deadly than dear old Ma Nature ever was able to, bless her heart. But now we are stumped by a pedagogical problem which is how to make it attack people and how to find people who don’t mind this sort of thing or who don’t matter. Just can’t swing this on our eight-figure budget. This little mother has already cost us over four hundred thousand. I’m now heading an interdepartmental department which starts with earthworms.”

  “Earthworms?” I ask.

  “Well actually the group includes earthworms, snails, slugs and other low-lying sticky fauna. One would never suspect that the lowly earthworm could be used as an instrument of war and holocaust, would one?”

  “Never.”

  “Well that’s what we felt until a little while ago. Then we developed this strain of extremely virile and prolific earthworms, three times fatter and twice as long as the regular size, and with a reproductive cycle not only three times shorter but also producing three times the offspring. Now supposing we were to seed the enemy farmlands with these extra-large worms which because they live underground are protected from insecticides, et cetera, except those that also kill crops. Now because of the excessive number of these beasts which would soon be produced, the enemy would first find his farmlands prospering extraordinarily because of the manner in which earthworms enrich the earth. The later effects however are most interesting. You have undoubtedly heard of Merula migratoria.”

  “No,” I say.

  He leans back and takes a piece of chalk and draws a picture of a bird on the blackboard.

  “On this continent it is more usually called the robin redbreast, which is a slightly different bird in Europe. However as you know the enemy has adopted the robin as its national bird because of its red front and the five-and ten-year plans now stress the importance of increasing robin production to catch up with whoever happens to be ahead at the moment.

  “Well now to continue. As you know robins like earthworms. The bigger the better. In fact we are presently developing a very prolific strain of robin, three times larger than any robin now known to exist. Well now in the first year of Operation Earthworm, earthworm production under enemy territory will jump ahead by leaps and bounds, bringing on a bumper robin crop the next year, robins which of course will be of this new variety. Now, you have undoubtedly heard of Felis domestica or Felis catus.”

  “No,” I say.

  He draws what looks to me like a cat on the blackboard.

  “More commonly known as the domesticated carnivore which we call the house cat, the common house cat. Now it is a well-known fact that cats like to catch robins and this situation is aided by the fact that robins must be on the ground in order to catch earthworms, though confidentially our department is working on a flying earthworm.”

  “What for?”

  “Strictly a terror weapon. Now of course we will have to develop a larger strain of house cats to catch the large robins. With this comes the twist of sheer genius. The CIA has found out that there are thirty-eight million house cats on enemy territory with a net increase of seventeen percent a year. Now we project a larger strain of house cat which like the earthworms and robins will be three times larger than the old model and so forth. CIA Market Research has indicated that the three-times-larger house cat is precisely what the average enemy housewife wants this very moment. That is, by the subtle, covert and clandestine introduction of these new cats so as to give the enemy the impression that they are a spontaneous generation of their ideology, very shortly they will become all the rage and very quickly the thirty-eight-million-plus old smaller house cats will be superannuated, purged and liquidated. Now with the large new house cat in circulation, what is going to happen?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Very simple. Because these new cats are larger, more powerful and faster, they will quickly decimate the rat and mice populations, giving the grain crop a boost it has never had before. All right, at this stage the situation is this: fat earthworms, fat robins, fat cats, bumper grain crop. Now just imagine what will happen when we introduce our Micro-Mouse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A mouse three times smaller but three times more prolific than the ordinary house mouse.” He draws a very small mouse on the blackboard. “Now this mouse is so small that the very large house cats will hardly be able to see it let alone catch it with their very large claws. And the Micro-Mouse because of its very light weight and relatively heavy fur can be dropped from an altitude of almost a hundred miles, almost literally rained down. You see the point.”

  “Well no not exactly.”

  “Well the Air Force is developing a special twenty-ton Pregnant Micro-Mouse Non-Recoverable Transport and Distribution Satellite, the PMMNRTDS for short, that will carry over seven million Micro-Mice, slightly over six million of which will land safely in enemy territory. Well now the complete reproductive cycle of these Micro-Mice is a classified secret of a classification which in itself is Cosmic Top Secret, and only two men in this world know the length of the Micro-Mouse Reproductive Cycle, the MMRC for short.”

  “Who?”

  “The mouse expert who invented the Micro-Mouse—and the President.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “But it’s pretty common knowledge that the MMRC takes about a day, conception to birth.”

  “Good God!”

  “Astounding, isn’t it? Now all seven million of these Micro-Mice will be of necessity pregnant females, timed to deliver their young upon touching down in enemy farmlands. Six million, that is those who survive the excursion, six million times twenty offspring makes an almost instantaneous total of one hundred and twenty-six million Micro-Mice, and put them in the Ukrainian Breadbasket and what do you get?”

  “Well …”

  “No grain. No bread. No corn. Nothing. Just eating Micro-Mice and frustrated extra-large cats.” Doc pulls out a Camel and lights it nervously. “Of course, there’s a rub.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Once even one pregnant Micro-Mouse is out, there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it.”

  “What about regular old-fashioned house cats?” I ask.

  “They can delay the explosion for perhaps a year, perhaps much less.”

  “So …”

  “Yes you see. If just one pregnant Micro-Mouse were to get out of Fort Frigge we would of necessity have to turn into a nation of mouse hunters devoting our complete gross national product of five hundred billion dollars to stamping out the little bastards. Much more dangerous than H-bombs.”

  “How many are here?”

  “With constant liquidation we keep the population down to a million. That sounds high but it isn’t—we have to control and perfect the strain and at the moment we’re trying to find that magic ingredient that will make them so distasteful to even ordinary house cats they won’t even bother to look at them. But every now and then I get the feeling that one of them is going to escape and then the mouse will be out of the bag, so to speak.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Statistically inevitable.”

  “I imagine the enemy would pay quite a pile for a pregnant Micro-Mouse.”

  “Quite,” says Doc. Then he whispers, “The highest offer so far is nine hundred grand.”

  “Not bad.”

  Doc leans over the desk a little closer.

  “Well as I see it,” he says, “one of these days a Micro-Mouse is going to make a break and of course its descendants will be running around the enemy embassy before you can yell mouse, so why not do what’s going to happen in the first place and make a little profit on it?”


  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Okay GASCOYNE if you can get me one-point-five million for them I’ll give you forty percent.”

  “Fifty on this one,” I say, “after all you get sixty percent of the regular NON-PROFIT ZOOLOGICAL SYSTEMS profits.”

  “Forty,” he insists.

  “Fifty.”

  “All right, fifty,” he says.

  Doc opens his desk drawer and pulls out a glass jar like the kind they put mayonnaise in, with a red screw-top with holes punched in it, and inside I can make out a couple of very tiny gray mice running around the leaves and straw and cotton. He wraps the jar up in the comics section of the Times and drops it in his briefcase and then he pulls a little paper bag from his desk and opens it up and shoves it in my face, it’s filled with wheat.

  “You are to insert the grains into the largest hole one by one. Under no circumstances are you to unscrew the top.”

  Then he pulls out two old perfume atomizers, one of them filled with a pink liquid, the other with a green.

  “This pinkish one contains a liquefied cyanide compound which you are to spray into the jar if things get out of hand or if there’s an emergency, and the other contains a virus to which the two pair of Micro-Mice in the jar are immune but not their offspring. This will enable you to keep the population down. Any questions?”

  “No Doc.”

  He puts all the junk in his briefcase and hooks up the chain between us again and we head out the office around a corner to employees’ reception where we have to wait a couple of minutes until my personal effects and valuables arrive and when they do I’m happy to find the little gold coin among them though some underpaid government employee lifted a grand of the three grand the Widow Roughah gave me and I’m a little pissed off about that.

  Doc and me shoot up to ground level in the elevator and they let us out of the building without even looking in Doc’s briefcase and also out of the base. I drive Doc through the underpass to the FORT FRIGGE BIG DADDY SERV-UR-SELPH STATION across the freeway where he’s getting his car greased. I stash the Micro-Mice in the glove compartment and drop him off.

  “For God’s sake be careful GASCOYNE,” he says. “One false step and we’re all finished, us human beings!”

  “I get it.”

  After I dump Doc I zoom back under the underpass and pull over to the curb in front of one of those old-fashioned grimy little grocery stores and leave the motor running in the Kaiser while I hop out and duck in for a couple of pounds of bananas for breakfast because I’m getting damn hungry all of a sudden. The old lady inside overcharges for the things in the first place and then to make matters really bad goes and weighs part of her left boob with them which makes me so burning mad I lift a pack of Wrigley’s from the counter while she dumps the bananas into a sack, though I still think she comes out about three cents ahead on the deal and I make a mental note to look into plopping a BONANZA-BANQUETTE SUPERMARKET down across the street, that’ll teach her.

  I climb back into the Kaiser and throw it in drive and turn left up the Skyway on-ramp and floor it with the supercharger on. I hit the slow lane about sixty and merge in just in front of a gas truck and dodge over to the fast lane and wind her up to eighty-five and start unpeeling the bananas. There’s something about munching bananas helps my thinking machinery and then too there’s nothing quite like dangling banana peels out the window and having them whipped from your fingers by the wind. I let one go and give Chester a ring.

  “Chester what’s up?”

  “First, Flash Fingers did a great job with the WESTBINDER BRANCH BANK. The whole place burned up and there isn’t a scrap of paper left there.”

  “Good. Anybody hear what the tax man had to say?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “he said it was a put-up job.”

  “Sure everybody knows that but can he prove it?”

  “He’d be a genius if he could.”

  “Right. What else?” I ask.

  “Let’s see …”

  There’s a hell of a long pause so I say, “You there Chester?”

  “Sure boss, just a little drowsy, sorry.”

  “All right. Well anyway what else is new?”

  “Oh. Those guys in the Porsche don’t work for O’Mallollolly and don’t seem to even live in the state.”

  “Hmm. You sure they’re not under O’Mallollolly?”

  “Not according to Al in Personnel.”

  “Can you trust him?” I ask.

  “Always have boss.”

  “All right, keep looking. What else is there?” I ask. Old Chester sounds pretty sluggish this morning.

  “What’s-his-name’s back in town, Fernando.”

  “Well, well.”

  “Yeah boss. He wants to set up a big motel on the Coast about a hundred and seven miles north for tired travelers of both sexes. He’s got a couple of hundred girls lined up.”

  “Well get the details Chester. Fernando’s the type I’ll back any day of the week. But now I want you to find out what happened to the body of Grant the Roughah butler who died of a heart attack just after Rufus got it because we’re going to need that body too. What about Rufus now?”

  “No news boss.”

  “Last thing, make a rendezvous usual time with old Nick Tsvkzov. Tell him I’ve got something really hot for him.”

  “Right boss.”

  I hang up and go through a couple of bananas and let the peels flap a little before letting them go, they make a nice little slappety-slap against the windowpane. Then all of a sudden there’s a wail of a siren behind me and I adjust the rearview to see what’s going on and discover a state trooper in a big black and white Mercury about three feet from my rear with red and blue lights flashing. Quickly I scoot over to the slow lane thinking he wants past to get to some twenty-car spectacular up the road a ways but damn if he doesn’t hit the slow lane too and with not an off-ramp in sight and so I get the general idea I’m supposed to stop, which is pretty ridiculous. I thought they gave all newborn state troopers a special course in my license numbers but I guess this one must have played hookey and since you never know when these jokers will take a notion to unload their guns at Mr. Average Motorist, I decide the best is to stop and have a talk, so I put my foot down on the brake and take it easy coming to a stop because of all the shudders and whamming up front in the front end.

  He pulls up behind me on the shoulder and climbs out of his Mercury like somebody’s smeared the seat with honey and hitches up his pants loaded with ammo and scratches his crotch and waddles over to my door and says, “Going pretty fast in an old clunker like this, aren’t you Pops?” Then he sticks his whole goddamn garlic-flavored head including cap and dark glasses in the window and says, “And you ought to know by now that there’s a law against littering.” He reaches in his shirt pocket and pulls out one of my banana peels and throws it plop in my lap.

  For me that’s about the last straw which means I’m really going to give this yokel enough rope to hang himself by both ends.

  “I have half a mind,” he goes on, “to make you get out and go pick up by hand every banana peel you’ve thrown out for the last three miles.”

  “Well!” I say.

  “On hands and knees.”

  That’s pretty abusive and I think this is one trooper who’s going to retire at an early age on about ten bucks a week and since he’s going to pay in the end I let him have his fun. He pulls out a super deluxe size traffic citation book and starts all the thumb licking and ball-point pen clicking the real dumb ones do.

  “You know Pops I also noticed you didn’t put on your directional signal while changing lanes and your stoplights don’t work. And I don’t see any state inspection sticker either. And it looks to me like both your windshield wipers have fallen off up there. You know, when I think about it a little, I think I would be doing a real service to the motoring public if I got you and this heap of a car off the roads entirely for about as long as I can make it stick, which is a
long, long time.”

  Well I figure things are about to the point of going too far so I reach for the door handle and give it a yank to get out and the damn thing comes off in my hand. I toss it on the floor and reach outside for that handle and get out to face the world’s most inflated state trooper.

  “Know who I am?” I ask.

  “No.”

  He chooses that moment to clear his throat right onto my front hubcap, the unsanitary slob.

  “Does that license number look at all familiar?” I ask.

  He leans back and looks at the front license plate.

  “Nope, sorry,” he says.

  I wonder what his I.Q. is. “Look,” I say. “It’s me, GASCOYNE.”

  “Prove it,” he says but I can tell he knows and has known all the damn while.

  I whip out my driver’s license and flick it to him. He glances at it and hands it back.

  “So you’re GASCOYNE,” he says like it doesn’t make any difference at all.

  “That’s right. I’m GASCOYNE.”

  “All right GASCOYNE.”

  Just the same the idiot opens his citation book and starts writing.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I ask, mighty peeved.

  Well he sort of goes huff and puff I’ll blow your house down and starts shouting at the top of his lungs, “What the hell do you think I’m doing? I’m giving you citations for speeding twenty miles over the legal limit, littering on five separate occasions, changing lanes without signaling, driving a car without stoplights, windshield wipers and a state inspection sticker, speaking with insufficient respect to a state officer of the law, and I’m going to recommend that this pile of junk be declared a menace to the motoring public and be banned from the public thorough-fares!”

  All this shouting about turns his face blue and in turn I’m almost ready to pull out my big guns and vaporize this toad but I decide not to because it’s pretty clear, clear as glass, that he’s just following orders and I’d better save my energy for the ones who are giving them.

  He tears out the ticket and I obligingly take it and make it into shredded paper that flies away in the wind.