Keep The Giraffe Burning (3 page)

‘Really? And how long would the conquest of man take? How would the little insects fare against the armies of the world?’

‘They never need to try. Armies are run by governments, and governments are run, for all practical purposes, by small panels of experts. Think tanks like the Orinoco Institute. And – this just occurred to me – for all practical purposes, you run the Institute.’

For once, Dr Grobe did not looked surprised. ‘Oh, so I’m in on the plot, am I?’

‘We’re all so crazy, we really depend on you. You can ensure that we work for the good of the cockroaches, or else you can get rid of us – send us away, or encourage our suicides.’

‘Why should I do that?’

‘Because you are afraid of them.’

‘Not at all.’ But his hand twitched, and a little cigar ash fell on his immaculate trousers. I felt my point was proved.

‘Damn. I’ll have to sponge that. Excuse me.’

He stepped into his private washroom and closed the door. My feeling of triumph suddenly faded. Maybe I was finally cracking. What evidence did I really have?

On the other hand, Dr Grobe was taking a long time in there. I stole over to the washroom door and listened.

‘… verge of suicide …,’ he murmured. ‘… yes … give up the idea, but … yes, that’s just what I …’

I threw back the door on a traditional spy scene. In the half-darkness, Dr G was hunched over the medicine cabinet, speaking into a microphone. He wore earphones.

‘Hank, don’t be a foo–’

I hit him, not hard, and he sat down on the edge of the tub. He looked resigned.

‘So this is my imagined conspiracy, is it? Where do these wires lead?’

They led inside the medicine cabinet, to a tiny apparatus. A dozen brown ellipses had clustered around it, like a family around the TV.

‘Let me explain,’ he said.

‘Explanations are unnecessary, Doctor. I just want to get out of here, unless your six-legged friends can stop me.’

‘They might. So could I. I could order the guards to shoot you. I could have you put away with your crazy friends. I could even have you tried for murder, just now.’

‘Murder?’ I followed his gaze back into the office. From under the desk, a pair of feet. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Hel Rasmussen. Poisoned himself a few minutes before you came in. Believe me, it wasn’t pleasant, seeing the poor fellow holding a bottle of cyanide to his armpit. He left a note blaming you, in a way.’

‘Me!’

‘You were the last straw. This afternoon, he saw you take an axe and deliberately cut down one of those beautiful maple trees in the yard. Destruction of beauty – it was too much for him.’

Trees again. I went to the office window and looked out at the floodlit landscape. One of the maples was missing.

Dr Grobe and I sat dawn again at our respective interview stations, while I thought this over. Blenheim and his mask came into it, I was sure of that. But why?

Dr Grobe fished his lifeless cigar from the ashtray. ‘The point is, I can stop you from making any trouble for me. So you may as well hear me out.’ He scratched a match on the sole of Hel’s shoe and relit the cigar.

‘All right, Oddpork. You win. What happens now?’

‘Nothing much. Nothing at all. If my profession has any meaning, it’s to keep things from happening.’ He blew out the match. ‘I’m selling ordinary life. Happiness, as you must now see, lies in developing a pleasant, comfortable and productive routine – and then sticking to it. No unpleasant surprises. No shocks. Psychiatry has always aimed for that, and now it is within our grasp. The cockroach conspiracy hasn’t taken over the world, but it has taken over the Institute – and it’s our salvation.

‘You see, Hank, our bargain isn’t one-sided. We give them a little shelter, a few scraps of food. But they give us something far more important: real organization.
The life of pure routine
.’

I snorted. ‘Like hurrying after trains? Or wearing ourselves out on
assembly-line work? Or maybe grinding our lives away in boring offices? Punching time-clocks and marching in formation?’

‘None of the above, thank you. Cockroaches never hurry to anything but dinner. They wouldn’t march in formation except for fun. They are free – yet they are part of a highly organized society. And this can be ours.’

‘If we’re not all put in detention camps.’

‘Listen, those camps are only a stage. So what if a few million grumblers get sterilized and shut away for a year or two? Think of the
billions
of happy, decent citizens, enjoying a freedom they have earned. Someday, every man will live exactly as he pleases and his pleasure will lie in serving his fellow men.’

Put like that, it was persuasive. Another half-hour of this and I was all but convinced.

‘Sleep on it, eh Hank? Let me know tomorrow what you think.’ His large hand on my shoulder guided me to the door.

‘You may be right,’ I said, smiling back at him. I meant it, too. Even though the last thing I saw, as the door closed, was a stream of glistening brown that came from under the washroom door and disappeared under the desk.

I sat up in my own office most of the night, staring out at the maple stump. There was no way out: either I worked for
Periplaneta americana
and gradually turned into a kind of moral cockroach myself, or I was killed. And there were certain advantages to either choice.

I was about to turn on the video-recorder to leave a suicide note, when I noticed the cassette was already recorded. I ran it back and played it.

Blenheim came on, wearing my face and my usual suit.

‘They think I’m you, Hank, dictating some notes. Right now you’re really at my house, reading a dull book in the library. So dull, in fact, that it’s guaranteed to put you into a light trance. When I’m safely back, Edna will come in and wake you.

‘She’s not as loony as she seems. The black eye is inked for her telescope, and the funny cap with lines on it, that looks like marcelled hair, that’s a weathermap. I won’t explain why she’s doing astronomy – you’ll understand in time.

‘On the other hand, she’s got a fixation that the stars are nothing but the shiny backs of cockroaches, treading around the heavenly spheres. It makes a kind of sense when you think of it:
Periplaneta
means around the world, and America being the home of the Star-Spangled Banner.

‘Speaking of national anthems, Mexico’s is La Cucaracha – another cockroach reference. They seem to be taking over this message!

‘The gang and I have been thinking about bugs a lot lately. Of course Pawlie has always thought about them, but the rest of us …’ I missed the next part. So Pawlie was at the madhouse? And they hadn’t told me?

‘… when I started work on the famous glass pancakes. I discovered a
peculiar feature of glass discs, such as those found on clock faces.

‘Say, you can do us a favour. I’m coming around at dawn with the gang, to show you a gadget or two. We haven’t got all the bugs out of them yet, but – will you go into Dr Grobe’s office at dawn, and check the time on his clock? But first, smash the glass on his window, will you? Thanks. I’ll compensate him for it later.

‘Then go outside the building, but on no account stand between the maple stump and the broken window. The best place to wait is on the little bluff to the North, where you’ll have a good view of the demonstration. We’ll meet you there.

‘Right now you see our ideas darkly, as through a pancake, I guess. But soon you’ll understand. You see, we’re a kind of cockroach ourselves. I mean, living on scraps of sanity. We have to speak in parables and work in silly ways because they can’t They live in a comfortable kind of world where elephants have their feet cut off to make umbrella stands. We have to make good use of the three-legged elephants.

‘Don’t bother destroying this cassette. It won’t mean a thing to any right-living insect.’

It didn’t mean much to me, not yet. Cockroaches in the stars? Clocks? There were questions I had to ask, at the rendezvous.

There was one question I’d already asked that needed an answer. Pawlie had been messing about in her lab, when I asked her to marry me. Two years ago, was it? Or three?

‘But you don’t like cockroaches,’ she said.

‘No, and I’ll never ask a cockroach for its claw in marriage.’ I looked over her shoulder into the glass case. ‘What’s so interesting about these?’

‘Well, for one thing, they’re not laboratory animals. I caught them myself in the basement here at the Institute. See? Those roundish ones are the nymphs – sexless adolescents. Cute, aren’t they?’

I had to admit they were. A little. ‘They look like the fat black exclamation points in comic strips,’ I observed.

‘They’re certainly healthy, all of them. I’ve never seen any like them. I – that’s funny.’ She went and fetched a book, and looked from some illustration to the specimens under glass.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Look, I’m going to be dissecting the rest of the afternoon. Meet you for dinner. Bye.’

‘You haven’t answered my question, Pawlie.’

‘Bye.’

That was the last I saw of her. Later, Dr Grobe put it about that she’d been found, hopelessly insane. Still later, George Hoad cut his throat.

The floodlights went off, and I could see dawn greyness and mist. I took a can of beans and went for a stroll outside.

One of the guards nodded a wary greeting. They and their cats were always jumpiest at this time of day.

‘Everything all right, officer?’

‘Yeah. Call me crazy, but I think I just heard an elephant.’

When he and his puma were out of sight, I heaved the can of beans through Dr Grobe’s lighted window.

‘What the hell?’ he shouted. I slipped back to my office, waited a few minutes, then went to see him.

A slender ray came through the broken window and struck the clock on the opposite wall. Grobe sat transfixed, staring at it with more surprise than ever. And no wonder, for the clock had become a parrot.

‘Relax, Oddpork,’ I said. ‘It’s only some funny kind of hologram in the clock face, worked by a laser from the lawn. You look like a comic villain, sitting there with that cigar stub in your face.’

The cigar stub moved. Looking closer, I saw it was made up of the packed tails of a few cockroaches, trying to force themselves between his closed lips. More ran up from his spotless collar and joined them, and others made for his nostrils. One approached the queue at the mouth, found another stuck there, and had a nibble at its kicking hind leg.

‘Get away! Get away!’ I gave Grobe a shake to dislodge them, and his mouth fell open. A brown flood of kicking bodies tumbled out and down, over his well-cut lapels.

I had stopped shuddering by the time I joined the others on the bluff. Pawlie and Blenheim were missing. Edna stopped scanning the horizon with her brass telescope long enough to introduce me to the pretty twins, Alice and Celia. They sat in the grass beside a tangled heap of revolvers, polishing their patent-leather tap shoes.

The ubiquitous Rastus was wiping off his burnt cork makeup. I asked him why.

‘Don’t need it anymore. Last night it was my camouflage. I was out in the woods, cutting a path through the electric fence. Quite a wide path, as you’ll understand.’

He continued removing the black until I recognized the late George Hoad.

‘George! But you cut your throat, remember? Mopping up blood –’

‘Hank, that was your blood. It was you cut your throat in the Gents. After Pawlie vanished. Remember?’

I did, giddily. ‘What happened to you, then?’

‘Your suicide attempt helped me make up my mind; I quit the Institute next day. You were still in the hospital.’

Still giddy, I turned to watch Joe Feeney operating the curious laser I’d seen in the library. Making parrots out of clocks.

‘I understand now,’ I said. ‘But what’s the watermelon for?’

‘Cheap cooling device.’

‘And the “flag”?’ I indicated the shawl-stick arrangement.

‘To rally round. I stuck it in the melon because they were using the umbrella stand for –’

‘Look!’ Edna cried. ‘The attack begins!’ She handed me a second
telescope.

All I saw below was the lone figure of Blenheim in his diving suit, shuffling slowly up from the river mist to face seven guards and two pumas. He seemed to be juggling croquet balls.

‘Why don’t we help him?’ I shouted. ‘Don’t just sit there shining shoes and idling.’

The twins giggled. ‘We’ve already helped some,’ said Alice, nodding at the pile of weapons. ‘We made friends with the guards.’

I got the point when those below pulled their guns on Blenheim. As each man drew, he looked at his gun and then threw it away.

‘What a waste,’ Celia sighed. ‘Those guns are made from just about the best chocolate you can get’

Blenheim played his parlour trick on the nearest guard: one juggled ball flew high, the guard looked up, and a second ball clipped him on the upturned chin.

Now the puma guards went into action.

‘I can’t look,’ I said, my eye glued to the telescope. One of the animals stopped to sniff at a sticky revolver, but the other headed straight for his quarry. He leapt up, trying to fasten his claws into the stranger’s big brass head.