The Butterfly Kid

23

AFTER EXHAUSTIVELY not settling the problems of battle plan and weapons — “Just have faith,” was M. T. Bear’s refrain — we reached the reservoir with less than fifteen minutes to spare — not to spare, rather: we still had to find out where the enemy was lurking.

It was twilight — blue shadows, red and name-it sky, little wisps of fog hovering gold above the water and tabby-gray under the trees — as pastoral a scene as you could ask. I suppose it was beautiful — it usually is — but I knew a bit too much to enjoy it properly.

“Hold on,” Michael shouted. “Here we go!”

The bus angled steeply up the bank, bumped and tottered over the top, hurtled down the other side, then glided smooth and easy as you please across the water on beds of raging foam.

All the chicks and Gary the unmentionable Frog screamed shrilly as we plunged over the bank. Patrick Gerstein hollered, “Yippee!” on the way down, and all of us said, “Oh wow!” when we floated out over the water.

“Now how do we find them?” I inquired respectfully. Mike was now officially in charge.

“Don’t have to,” highly pleased. “I know exactly where they are.”

He piloted us mainly north, threading neatly through a cluster of inconsequential islands, while his look of smug self-confidence all but glowed.

“Back when I was in high school,” he explained with somewhat indecent delight, “I had this plot to dose the reservoir with LSD.” He almost never called it acid. “Never did get around to doing it, though. Got involved with some chick instead.” Pause. “Hell! I’ve forgotten her name. How about that? She was my first girl, too, if you don’t count my cousin Sheila — and you wouldn’t if you knew her, believe me. And now I can’t even remember her name. Let’s see…”

He was quite capable of carrying on like that all night if no one stopped him, so I stopped him. “What about your acid plot?”

“Oh yeah, that. Well, the first thing I did, of course, was scout the reservoir for a base to work from. I needed a place that was convenient to the road but well hidden — a wooded ravine or gully, say — with enough room for whatever equipment I might need, plus easy access to the water, like a sheltered beach or inlet. Found it, too. There’s just one place hereabouts that’s suitable for this kind of action, and we’re headed straight toward it now.”

It was getting dark, but I could see the place he meant ahead of us: a low beach leading into a willow-choked ravine.

Then, “Michael?” a bassoon implored. Andrew Blake had joined us.

“Yes, Andy?”

“We’re nearly there.”

“Right.”

“Yes. I’ve been wondering.”

“What about?” Mike reduced speed. The bus crawled toward the hostile beach.

“We’re planning to, ah, Fight these creatures. Right?”

“Right.”

“Yes. But how? We don’t even have a gun.” It was nice to see somebody else worrying about that.

“Don’t need guns, believe me. We’ve got the perfect weapon, Andy. Just relax.”

“What weapon?” We were getting closer to the shore. It looked deserted.

“Why am I the only person who can think around here?” Mike snapped. Andy recoiled in alarm. “Think, Andy, think! We already have the perfect weapon. You’ve seen it yourself. Now just think about it.”

The odds were 49 to 51 that Michael’s perfect weapon was essentially bull, quite unbeknownst to him, of course, but it was worth thinking about. I’d rather think about that than the withering tide of alien annihilation I expected to stream out at us from under those suspiciously innocent-looking willows. The perfect… Oh.

Andy had it, too, and stuck an index finger up to mark it “Of course!” he said in wonder. “Of course!”

“Sure,” I ratified. “The bus.”

“What else?”

What else indeed? The bus could go almost everywhere, over almost any obstacle, and its down blast was strong enough to turn even the biggest lobster into sky-blue library paste. But somehow I couldn’t feel as certain about it as Michael felt. A weapon, yes. Even a good weapon, yes. But perfect? Or even very good? I didn’t know yet what they were, but I knew in my bones there were serious flaws to Michael’s perfect weapon. At least one of these was that we didn’t know what kind of weapons the lobsters were likely to use.

Besides, I’m just not built to put much trust in perfect anythings. The word perfect seems to turn me off somehow.

We were now just a few yards offshore, cruising slowly back and forth parallel to the beach. The whole scene still looked thoroughly deserted, and I entertained the possibility of Michael’s having goofed.

The MacDougal Street Commandos had deserted their seats to bunch up at the shoreward windows, stampeding from one side to the other every time Mike turned the bus around. This complicated driving considerably, but Mike didn’t say anything about it. Most unusual for him.

“I don’t see nothing,” from Gary the Frog. “You see anything, Harry?”

“Not a thing, sugar lump.” God in heaven!

“Me too,” says Brother Gerstein. All the rest chimed in.

Now that we were actually there, I found myself feeling uncomfortable in a different, more practical way. The trouble was, I couldn’t hear anything. Nothing important, anyhow. Thanks to my absurd myopia (20-300), I’ve never been much of a visual cat. In fact, I’m more of an ear man, which is convenient, since I hear better than just about everyone I’ve ever met. But now my hearing was being sorely handicapped.

In our present situation, with night coming on strong and all, straining my eyes to see a hypothetical blue lobster in an almost black shadow didn’t make much sense, but if I’d been able to hear properly, I’d’ve known in a minute if the lobsters were out there, and if they were, exactly where they were hiding. A muffled claw click, willow leaves brushing against a carapace — such tiny, all but inaudible noises would’ve told me all I needed to know.

But I couldn’t hear. The mingled roars of the bus’s props and engines drowned out everything but fairly loud talk inside the cabin. Right. So much for perfect weapons.

And it was now quite dark. Mike switched on the headlights and the movable high-powered spotlights and. lashed the beach with strands of brightness. Still nothing to be seen.

“Hey, baby” — Little Micky speaking for the first time since Times Square — “we got, like, the wrong address. You dig? We…”

He froze with his eyes opened wider than his mouth, staring out the window behind me and beginning to shake just a little bit. As I was turning around, one of the girls — don’t know which one — issued a staccato shriek that was a good bit more convincing than the customary sostenuto job. Someone else, also unidentified, keeled over with a sonorous thump.

Now I could see it, too, standing gold and scarlet there in unearthly power and brute splendor on the beach that just a clock-tick back was utterly deserted.

It was roughly twelve feet tall, essentially saurian, overwhelmingly carnivorous. But it had three toothy heads, all evil, each on its own long, muscular, sinuous neck, and at least six limbs — two big ones at the bottom, two slimmer but incredibly powerful-looking ones at the bottom of its rib cage if it had one, and two small and maybe not very strong short ones at the top, all ending in unusually large numbers of long, battle-sharp talons. It looked like a red Tyrannosaurus rex with lots of optional equipment.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why and how it had three heads. I should think one would suffice, and be a full day’s work to manage, too. But what kind of environment would favor multiple heads? None I’d willingly imagine.

With a liquid, terrifying motion, the beast aimed two of those heads at us. The third, held high, slowly turned from side to side, ignoring us completely. So: a built-in sentry.

One of the heads roared at us. Then another one joined in, not on the same pitch but a pretty good fifth above. The two roars merged in a sub bass sonority that shook our bones. Then the third head joined the chorus and I fell down and blacked out. There are some disadvantages to being an ear man.

When I came to, we were cruising thirty yards offshore. The thing was gone.

“Don’ know where he went to, baby,” Little Micky reported. “He just jumped straight up and forgot about the comedown, dig it, man?”

Despite the air conditioning, the bus was growing warm. The beast’s triple roar had powdered our windows.

Sandi and Harriet had fainted and were still out of it. Sativa was wandering blankly, saying, “Ohh.” I wondered if she’d had second thoughts about her daily karma.

Gary the inevitable Frog seemed to have vanished. For a wild instant I thought he’d been devoured, and then I remembered where, knowing Gary, he must be. Sure enough, when I opened the toilet door, there he was, in a sadly unaesthetic condition from having reached the john an inch too late but otherwise undamaged.

Leo was hovering over Sandi, somehow clucking but unharmed. Andrew Blake was muttering to himself, or maybe God, or both, in execrable Latin. Karen was holding his hand. Apparently she hadn’t fainted. Very odd.

Pat and Stu were as excited as kids at an earthquake and kept asking one another, “Did you see it, man? Did you really see it?” Kevin was serenely manufacturing quaint theories to explain the thing. Little Micky was at a window, waiting for the next event.

Everyone was basically all right, so I went forward to confer with Mike.

“Perfect weapon, Mike?” I teased unfairly.

“Hey, I thought you said these lobster men were nonviolent.”

“They are. But they don’t object to anything else’s being violent, if that’s its nature. And if something like that triple dinosaur happens to get violent at us, well, that’s our affair — and the dinosaur’s — and doesn’t concern Ktch and company at all. That’s how they explain it, anyhow.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t think they meant to let that creature hurt us any. You noticed that they got rid of it the instant it jumped. They just wanted to scare us, that’s all.”

“Swell. They sure know how to get what they want, don’t they?”

“Generally.”

From the rear floated treble snatches of, “Oh dear God! I saw it! Oh my!” which meant that Sandi was conscious again and functioning normally.

“How do you feel?” Mike almost whispered.

“Me?” Scared.”

“Me, too.”

“Groovy. What do we do now?”

We thought about that for a while. Outside, the darkness thickened. There were no stars visible and no moon, though last night at this time the moon was halfway up and nearly full. The sky had been clear at sunset, too. Apparently the lobster gang wasn’t taking any chances or missing any bets. I didn’t mention this to Mike, though.

We were waiting, intensely waiting, all of us and everything, consciously, yearningly, terrifiedly waiting. It was a texture, this waiting, a pressure where pressure was impossible. The dull, scared taste of apprehension covered everything: I could almost hear it. I had to give Ktch credit; he was thorough.

“I don’t know,” Mike said a little shrilly. “I don’t know what to do at all. I had something worked out before, but I’ve forgotten it.” I’d never heard him sound afraid before. I didn’t like it.

“Well, the first thing we’ve got to do,” with fraudulent briskness, “is keep that beach as brightly lit as we can, to keep the lobster gang from pouring their reality drug into the reservoir. That’s the important thing.”

“Light? Why should that stop them?” He still sounded scared.

“Shame, Michael, unadulterated shame. The things they believe and the things they do are almost mutually exclusive, for one thing; and they seem to be compulsive rationalizers, for another; which leads me to think they have an overdeveloped sense of shame.”

“Hey!” a bit less fear, “maybe we can work on their sense of shame!!”

“Not a chance. A sense of shame’s not much use to anyone. They won’t mind dosing our water, but they won’t want to do it while we’re watching, and that’s all the benefit we can expect from their sense of shame. However…”

One of the troopers screamed like a sudden banshee. Mike nearly fainted. I ran back to see what was happening.

Nothing was happening.

“I don’t know what got into me,” Karen sobbed. “I just, you know, kept getting scareder and scareder, until I just had to let it out or do something horrible. I don’t know!” She poured tears on Andrew’s shoulder.

This was Ktch’s waiting-and-apprehension game at work. I could feel it myself, though I wasn’t paying much attention to it. But something had to be done. A mere glance at our formerly brave little band was enough to tell me that. They were all unnaturally pale, some had developed tics, more had taken to looking back over their shoulders nervously, as though some hellish Thing were lurking there, and none of them looked at all happy. Even Pat’s grin, impossible to erase, had a rather hollow look to it.

“Listen to me, you guys,” I ordered firmly and loudly. “This is just one of the lobster gang’s tricks, this fear-and-waiting bit. That’s all it is, just a trick. It’s not real. Honestly it’s not.”

They looked half hopeful and a bit less credulous, which was an improvement, but not enough.

“Listen. We don’t have to put up with this. We can make them stop it. Yes we can. I did it. I did it last night, and I did it again this morning, when they had me tied up in their loft. It’s easy.”

I moved back to the harpsichord, gesturing to the rest of the band to follow.

“All we have to do is sing at them. Really. That’s all there is to it. We’ll give ’em ‘Love Sold in Doses,’ right? That’s the song I used, and it worked like a charm. Honestly! I think they’re a little afraid of it. Everybody sing, you hear? If you don’t know the words, hum something. Ready? Let’s go!”

And Sativa and The Tripouts and the MacDougal Street Commandos swung into “Love Sold in Doses.” It was pretty ragged at first, but it firmed up quickly, and by the end of the second verse we were doing right well by it. We were feeling better, too — all of us. You could tell it from the singing.

And then, suddenly, like a guitar string snapping, the waiting-and-apprehension business stopped. We all lit up like happy bulbs.

“Keep on singing!” I yelled. “Sing it again. Don’t stop until I do. And sing louder! Let the lobster gang hear it like it is. Louder!”

Oh my, but they were loud! Gary the cacophonous Frog was the loudest of the lot, of course, and flat to boot, but this was no time for technical quibbles. I smiled encouragement at him and — mirabile! — he sang even louder.

Halfway through the second time, the sky began to lighten. When we started on the third time, it was perfectly clear, with stars all over and a big old full moon brighter than a streetlight, and we just went on singing.

At the end of the fifth performance, Laszlo Scott shuffled onto the beach waving a piece of white cloth. We gave them a sixth performance for luck, then quit. We were all a little hoarse, and some of us weren’t as fond of “Love Sold in Doses” as we had been, but we’d won our first skirmish with the lobster gang and we all felt approximately wonderful.

“Head for shore, Mike,” I yelled. “Loathsome Laszlo wants to talk.”