The VMR Theory (v1.1) (10 page)

“Let’s get back to the issue at hand. You’re going to feed me to
that?”

“Oh, no, Mr. MacKay. T’at would obviously be unfair. Merely feeding you to a shadur would not afford you an opportunity to display your sophisticated skills, nor would it give us a meaningful basis to assess your vam-pirish potential.” Wipo reached into his pouch and produced an eight-centimeter pocketknife. “Your weapon.”

“Thanks a whole heck of a lot.” A nine-millimeter pistol would have been nicer. Then I could have at least plugged Wipo.

“Oh!” Wipo reached into his pouch and pulled out what looked like a metal Frisbee. “You may have a shield as well.”

“Gee, thanks.” I stared at my undersized sword and buckler with distaste.

Wipo folded his hands as the guards surrounded us. “Any last words, Mr. MacKay? A final request? A plea for leniency?”

“We’re not up to that part yet. What happens if I whip old brontosaur-breath there?”

“I suppose we will have to find anot’er way to dispose of you.”

“Not good enough.” I folded my arms. “As my mother used to say’, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, quit.’ If I win, I go free. Otherwise, I don’t perform.”

“Are you attempting to bargain with me, Mr. MacKay?”

“Think about it. You want information from this little encounter. If I just stand around and become fast food, you don’t learn anything. So what do you say?”

“Good-bye, Mr. MacKay.”

“Well, it was worth a try.”

The guards opened the door and pushed me into the Vor’dur at pike-point. They quickly slammed the door shut behind me.

I didn’t have much time to sightsee, but the Vor’dur looked to be a hundred and fifty meters across, with a fifteen meter ceiling and a flooring of crushed stone underfoot. The shadur seemed to take up most of it.

Close up, the animal appeared to be fifteen meters long from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail, which meant that it was probably about half that size. Its belly was stretched taut, which indicated that it hadn’t been eating regularly, and its hairless skin was covered with knobby protuberances, suggesting poor personal hygiene. Its eyes were situated around the sides of its barrel-shaped head, which it turned first to one side and then to the other to get a good look at me.

The economy-size chewing equipment didn’t leave much room for brains. On the other hand, I didn’t have a great deal to lose by attempting to make polite conversation. “Ah, hello, there. Fancy running into you like this.”

The thing put its head down and its tail up and headed in my direction at a dead run.

I took a backward step. “Uh, can we talk this over?”

A raking foreclaw slashed the air over my head.

I felt the wall against my back. “Uh, have you considered alternate career choices? I don’t know what the zoos are paying, but I hear there’s real money in kiddie shows.”

A pair of maroon jaws descended. Dodging right, I put my right foot in a large pile of desiccated dung and fell flat on my face. Dazzlingly white teeth the size of bowie knives clicked shut a few centimeters over my head. Lacking binocular vision, the monster immediately straightened and looked around to see where dinner had gotten to.

Now, if life were perfect, I would have experienced a sudden surge of hysterical strength, grabbed Big Boy by his tail, and practiced the hammer throw. Instead I felt like a sack of manure could have outwrestled me two falls out of three.

The public address system came on. “An excellent start, Mr. MacKay,” Wipo quipped. “I would point out to you t’at a shadur’s fangs are set in multiple rows and curve backward. A shadur’s upper fangs are, of course, larger and sharper so t’at when its biting muscles contract, tee lower fangs hold flesh in position for tee saw edges of tee upper fangs to slash. A most ingenious system, would you not say?”

I was really beginning to dislike the guy.

As I scrambled to my knees, Big Boy eyed me the way a robin eyes a worm. Finding that I had misplaced my penknife, which was lying next to the claws on the animal’s right foot, I flung my shield and bounced it off its nose.

It tilted its head the other way and looked at me with the other eye.

“Didn’t your mother teach you not to play with your food?” I muttered. Determined to go down fighting, I followed up the shield with a handful of rock-solid shadur poop.

Its head cocked sideways, the shadur took this one in the eye. For the moment, it was even less happy than I was. Tilting its head toward the ceiling, it voiced a wild and terrible cry.

I took advantage of the situation to crawl between its legs and retrieve my penknife. Then I was struck by the sudden inspiration that the only place in the room where it couldn’t reach me was on top of its back. After twenty-odd hours of starvation, the dumbest ideas seem plausible. Using the knobs on its hide for handholds, I climbed up.

I found out two things very quickly. The first was that the nodules on the shadur’s hide were fine for climbing while the animal was standing still, but weren’t easy to hang on to when it started moving. The second was the critter had a cartilaginous frame. Being boneless, it was effectively double-jointed.

As I found myself sliding down the shadur’s back I tried jamming my knife in its hide to halt my slide. About a half second later I noticed that the animal had twisted its head around 180 degrees and was about to take a bite out of my midriff. I quickly lost interest in trying to hang on.

Several things happened very quickly. When my knife penetrated the skin, it creased the nerve cord, causing the shadur to twitch convulsively as it chomped down on the spot where I was before I went flying gracefully through the air like a rag doll. Distracted by pain and with its vision screwed up, the animal missed and bit into its own back.

I, of course, landed on my head. It hurt.

A few moments later Wipo opened the door and joined me to watch the beast in its death throes.

I used my free hand to find my spine, hoping for an out-of-body experience because the body I had wasn’t working very well. As a vamp, I am, of course, allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen, so when I get a headache, it comes to stay and brings suitcases. “Excuse me for not getting up. You, ah, wouldn’t happen to know a good chiropractor, would you?”

Wipo bobbed his head at me in obvious disbelief, then pulled out his notepad and began writing. My banged-up little dictionary translated, “Possible application of Cotdenis Theory of Economics to hunting of shadurs. Apparently if paid enough, shadurs will hunt themselves.”

I sat up and tried twisting my neck back into place. “So, what’s next? Do you feed me to giant sandworms or send me over Niagara Falls in a barrel?”

Wipo paused to consider this. “Hmmm, no. Not tonight. We would have to lay on a plane, and it would lake too long. I must consult with our ephors.”

He ordered the guards to dump me back in my cell, which is where I ended up after I washed up and signed a few autographs.

The cell was depressing. Lunch was some sort of fricassee, and I thought I recognized bits of Big Boy floating around in it. For some reason, my guards also sent down a bottle of mediocre whiskey and a carton of Bulgarian cigarettes on the end of a boat hook. As the day wore on my blood sugar began doing flip-flops.

I amused myself by reciting all I remembered of
Richard III.
That used up all of ten minutes, including long pauses. I switched to mumbling prayers of the “Dear God, if You get me out of this, I’ll never, ever do whatever it was again” variety.

The praying, interestingly enough, really spooked the guards. I could hear them talking to each other and running around overhead. Figuring God would understand, I started praying louder.

As the hours passed and I started feeling loopy, I tried working my way through the Bible, improvising freely whenever memory failed, which was fairly frequently. I got up to Ecclesiastes and was trying to remember whether the chapter starts out “Vanity of vanities” or “Insanity of insanities”—both of which applied to my situation—when God finally came through. I heard a voice say, “Psst. Ken!”

“Oh, great.” I rubbed my sore neck. “Now I’m hallucinating.”

“You’re not hallucinating. It’s me.”

‘”Even better. My hallucinations are arguing with me.” The ladder came floating down, and Catarina followed. “We’re here to get you out, Ken.”

“Great.” I staggered to my feet and leaned against the wall for a moment. “You should have rung me up and told me you were going to drop in.”

She let it slide. Catching me by the arm, she handed me a carton of Leopard Milk. “Here, drink this.”

“Can we send out for Chinese?” I downed the Leopard Milk and swayed. “I don’t think I’m thinking too well. You’ll have to think for both of us.”

She steered me toward the ladder. “I didn’t realize the danger you were in until Trixie called me.”

Trixie appeared at the trapdoor in a gas mask with a submachine gun in her hand. “Oh, poor Ken. You look terrible.”

I put my foot through the ladder. “Fortunately, I look much better than I feel.”

“Come on, Ken, it’s better when you help,” Catarina coaxed. When we reached the top, she handed me a squeeze bottle. “Here, drink this.”

I downed it. “Tell Harry to stop trying to make beer in the sink.”

“That was medicine.” She unwrapped a chocolate bar and gave it to me. “You’ll feel better in a minute.”

“My neck is killing me.” While I was trying to figure out which end of the chocolate bar to stick in my mouth, a second Macdonald appeared, also wearing a gas mask.

Catarina gently guided my hand. “Ken, this is Battalion Leader Tskhingamsa from Army Intelligence.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. T. Excuse me for talking with my mouth full. Isn’t Army Intelligence a contradiction in terms?”

Catarina tightened her grip. “Ken, please don’t make any jokes.” She turned me over to Trixie for a second, hilling on the counterweight to haul the ladder up, she locked the trapdoor and carefully stuffed the keys into i he pocket of one of my guards who was slumped against the wall snoring.

“Sleep gas,” Tskhingamsa explained. “Very effective. Please come t’is way.”

He led us down the hall to a broom closet. When Trixie opened the door, I saw narrow steps leading away from a false back and my head started to clear. I looked at Tskhingamsa. “I, uh, appreciate your helping me escape, but aren’t you going to get in trouble for this?”

“I must help to prevent tee ephors from making irreversible mistakes,” Tskhingamsa said stiffly as Catarina and Trixie helped me down the steps and he sealed up the back of the broom closet behind us.

Catarina smiled grimly. “The navy and the Special Secret Police back the war faction, while the army sup-|x>rts the peace faction.”

Tskhingamsa added, “It is my sworn duty to protect our people from all foreign and domestic enemies, especially tee navy and tee Special Secret Police. If t’eir plannings are not disconcerted, t’ey will drag our people into a senseless war wit’ tee Confederation, and wreck tee army’s budget.”

“You guys in Army Intelligence don’t think I’m James Bond, do you?”

“Army Intelligence has grasped tee essential distinction between fiction books, which are artistic lies, and nonfiction books, which are only partly artistic lies.” Tskhingamsa cocked his head the way Catarina does. “However, we have noticed in tee category of autobiographies, t’is distinction tends to blur.”

I stopped to rest for a moment when we reached the bottom of the staircase. Trixie cooed, “Poor Ken. What did t’ey do to you?”

I’m always polite to women carrying submachine guns, so I did my best to recount my combat with the shadur in the Vor’dur. As I described the shadur’s final belly flop into the dirt in moderately graphic detail, I noticed Catarina standing next to me, shaking her head. “Am I making this too easy?”

She nodded. Then she intoned, “Over all of middle earth, a great shadur has fallen.”

The expression on my face probably resembled the expression on the shadur’s face when it hit ground. “Catarina, dearest,” I said as sweetly as I could manage.

She gave my arm a squeeze. “How about, ‘In the sand of Vor’dur, where the shadurs lie’?”

Although my eyes were focusing, my recovery was definitely on hold, so I switched topics. “What have I missed?”

“Things have been a little hectic. Wyma Jean tried to commit suicide by overdosing herself with Korean food. After we got her stomach pumped and let her sleep it off, she ripped a fire ax off the wall and went looking for Harry.”

“Love makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it’s compounding a felony,” I quoted.

“Also, Clyde got caught rifling the papers in Bobby’s office. Old Bobby foxed us with the kind of private secu-rily system you can’t afford on a lieutenant commander’s salary. I had a bad four hours in Ambassador Meisenhelder’s office trying to keep him from crucifying Clyde, who is still under house arrest.”

Tskhingamsa interrupted, “Please, enough talk now. We must go into tee tunnel.”

Trixie pushed aside a panel and disappeared. As I bent over to follow, everything looked pitch-black to me. “Uh, can we turn on the lights in here?”

The playful expression on Catarina’s face told me more than I wanted to know.

“Regrettably, we Klo’klotixag see deeper into tee ultraviolet spectrum t’an humans do,” Tskhingamsa said. “My deepest apologies.”

“You must hold on to my belt very, very tightly,” Trixie purred.

“And I’ll have a hand in your pocket all the way,” Catarina assured me. “Just remember not to try to stand up.”

Four bruises later we emerged in a sewer pumping station. While Tskhingamsa went to get the car, Catarina reached into her belt pouch and fished out a chocolate bar. “You look like you could use this.”

“Thanks.” I bit into it.

As soon as Tskhingamsa was out of earshot, Catarina said quietly, “Trixie has been passing information to Dr. Blok for about two years. For all practical purposes, she was Blok’s agent network, so she has serious reservations about staying behind if Blok goes with us. She set up a meeting, but Blok isn’t sure how far to trust her or us.”