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Authors: John Sladek

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BOOK: Bugs
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The front page depicted a painted battle scene with tanks, helicopters, and smoke. The perspective was that of the losing side. A far-off helicopter appeared to be dropping hundreds of dwarf soldiers across a field. In the middle
distance, the dwarfs were swarming like cockroaches over a tank, climbing into its ventilators and ports. Nearby, a dwarf shot laser beams into the face of a soldier; another soldier was already down, with dwarfs sitting upon him in triumph.

After a few minutes, a flight attendant knocked and said: ‘Mr Jones, can you come out?’

He straightened up to his full height and opened the door.

‘Mr Jones, this man says the State Department has cancelled your passport. If that’s true, you’ll have to deplane.’

Fred looked at Stylite, holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose. ‘There must be some mistake. The State Department has nothing to do with
my
passport. I am a British subject, on my way home. Here’s my passport.’

Stylite sputtered in his handkerchief, but had no reply. Within a few minutes, he was forced to deplane alone, defeated. An old man waiting for the toilet turned to look at him. ‘Say, what’s wrong with that fella’s nose?’

‘Altitude,’ Fred explained.

An hour or so later, the plane was airborne. Fred slipped into the non-being of a flight. He opened a glossy magazine provided by the airline and stared at the red lines on the map. The polar route. He could close his eyes and see the polar ice-cap, blowing snow, a misshapen figure lurching across the ice: James Arness or Boris Karloff.

Then it was the Vexxo site again. The quiet snow. Nothing moving. Then something moved, a hand clawing its way up through the snow. A single disembodied hand groping about until it finds the first green circuit board, drags it back to the body and installs it.

The hand tapped him on the shoulder.

He awoke. The moon face looking down at him belonged to the despicable Mr Hook.

‘Fred Jones, isn’t it? That seat next to you empty? Good show. I’ll just nip in for a natter.’

‘Mr Hook.’

‘Captain Hook, actually. I have a navy commission. We all do in our line of work.’

Hook settled into the seat next to Fred, and commenced staring at him with an owlish intensity. ‘Frankly, we’d like to ask you to join the Firm.’

‘What firm?’

‘The Firm.
The
Firm. Can’t make it plainer than that without spelling it out. You must have read John Le Carré.
Verb. sap
.’

‘You want me to join M15, is that it?’

‘Not so loud.’ Hook took off his oversized glasses, and polished them on his tie.

‘Your tie, Captain Hook.’

‘What about it?’

‘Charing Cross Poly. My college.’

‘Amazing coincidence,’ said Hook.

‘No, it isn’t. You put it on deliberately to appear sympathetic. All part of the standard Gestapo interrogation procedure.’

‘Very good!’

‘But no one who actually went to Charing Cross Poly would dream of putting on one of their filthy ties.’

Hook came close to laughing. ‘Excellent. Clever lad. You’ll do well in the Firm.’

‘Not a chance.’

‘Let me tell you, we’ve been watching you for some time. You first came to our attention at Esperanto’s.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Esperanto’s in New York. When you near as like bagged the Emir. You handled that well.’

‘I did what?’

‘Then your liaison with Miss Ivanova, at the same time you were dealing with the wily Nipponese. Not to mention the free telly you managed to wangle out of the Koreans. And you got next to General Lutz by bedding his inamorata, Rain Fellini. We found you everywhere we looked, Jones. Your tradecraft is superb. No one knows who you are. Yet you’re obviously a player in the big game.’

‘You’re obviously round the bloody twist.’

‘The marvellous part is how you never broke cover, not even when that criminal lunatic came after you with a knife. Not even just now, nutting that poor IRS agent. Where I come from, we used to call that a Kirby kiss. Anyway, you are most definitely our kind of player.’

‘Piss off.’

‘First let me elaborate. We offer a competitive salary, job security, expenses, a car – only an Escort, mind, but we can’t all have Aston Martins with machine-guns, can we? There’s also an attractive pension plan, the usual tea-breaks and so on.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Then there’s our club. Very popular dining-room. Meat and two veg every day. Choice of afters: rhubarb and custard, or spotted dick.’

‘Piss off.’

‘The club bar isn’t quite what it was before the cuts, but what is? South African sherry isn’t all that bad, once you get used to it. And there are full athletic facilities; we like our people to keep in trim. Complete line of exercise equipment, sauna, birching, handcuffs, barbed wire, whatever you fancy. Even dressing up in Sister’s clothes.’

‘That wasn’t my idea.’

‘Pity.’

‘Just piss off.’

‘Think it over, Jones. Whoever you’re working for, if you ever get bored, give us a ring at this number.’ He handed Fred a card. ‘I’d better get back to my seat in business class. It really ought to be first class, but what with the cuts …’

When Hook was gone, Fred dozed again. He was watching a new type of television which emulated fine Dutch paintings. The screen or canvas showed a kind of Vermeer, a painting glowing with the cool light of Delft. It showed a servant girl wearing a quiet subdued expression. The light of Vermeer shone out of her fine skin, shone on the bare wall behind her, shone reflected in the liquid corner of her eye.

One thing was unlike Vermeer. In place of the conventional cloth cap, this girl had covered her hair with a beaded brown cap. The cap glistened oddly. He found himself looking at it as he approached her.

On closer inspection, the glistening cap was a tight cluster of killer bees. The girl was not calm; she was frozen with fear, terrified of making the slightest movement.

‘Keep still,’ he said. ‘I’ll draw them away.’ Then the girl lifted her eyes and looked at Fred.

‘Keep still? I’m dead.’ Her voice hummed like a swarm. ‘Can’t you see I’m dead. They have built their hive in my skull.’

In mine, too, he realized. In all of us. There are no people left. Kudzu the magnificent had spoken. No more humans, only walking hives, humming, humming the killer code.

‘Too late for us,’ he groaned out of his sleep. ‘But you can save yourselves. Keep watching the skies … keep watching the skies …’

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Also by John Sladek
 

Novels

The Reproductive System
(1968) (aka
Mechasm
)

The Muller-Fokker Effect
(1970)

Roderick
(1980)

Roderick At Random
(1983)

Tik-Tok
(1983)

Bugs
(1989)

Wholly Smokes

Collections

The Steam-Driven Boy
(1970)

Keep The Giraffe Burning
(1977)

Alien Accounts
(1982)

The Lunatics Of Terra
(1984)

Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek
(2001)

John Sladek (1937 - 2000)

John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael Moorcock’s groundbreaking
New Worlds
magazine. Sladek began writing SF with ‘The Happy Breed’, which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology
Dangerous Visions
in 1967, and is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections include
The Muller Fokker Effect, Roderick
and
Tik Tok
, for which he won a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there in March 2000.

Copyright
 

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © The Estate of John Sladek 1989

All rights reserved.

The right of John Sladek to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 11060 1

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

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