Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

With a cry of rage, Rudy snatched the silver cap from his head and flung it away. Professor Pavlova caught it, as if she had been expecting his reaction. Horrified, he turned on her. “They hate us! The very fish hate us!” He could feel the sturgeon’s deadly anger burning into his back, and this filled him with shame and self-loathing, even though he knew he did not personally deserve it. All humans deserved it, though, he thought. All humans supported the idea of putting fish in tanks. Those who did not were branded eccentrics and their viewpoint dismissed without a hearing.

“This is a terrible invention! It does not reveal the universal brotherhood natural among disparate species entwined in the Great Web of Life — quite the opposite, in fact!” He despaired of putting his feelings into words. “What it reveals may be the truth, but is it a truth that we really we need to know?”

Professor Pavlova smiled mirthlessly. “You understand so well the inequalities in human intercourse and the effect they have on the human psyche. And now! Now, for the first time, you understand some measure of what a fish feels and thinks. Provided it has been kept immobile and without stimulation for so many years it is no longer sane.” She glanced over at Old Teddy with pity. “A fish longs only for cold water, for food, for distances to swim, and for a place to lay its eggs or spread its milt. We humans have kept Teddy in a tank for over a century.”

Then she looked at Rudy with almost the same expression. “Imagine how much worse it would be for a human being, used to sunshine on his face, the feel of a lover’s hand, the soft sounds an infant makes when it is happy, to find himself — even if of his own volition — nothing more than a Naked Brain afloat in amniotic fluid. Sans touch, sans taste, sans smell, sans sound, sans sight, sans everything. You have felt the fish’s hatred. Imagine how much stronger must be the man’s.” Her eyes glittered with a cold fire. “I have suspected this for years, and now that I have experienced Teddy’s mind — now I know. ” She sliced her hand outward, as if with a knife, to emphasize the depth of her knowledge, and its force. “The Naked Brains are all mad. They hate us and they will work tirelessly for our destruction.”

“This is what I have been saying all along,” Rudy gasped. “I have been trying to engage — ”

Pavlova interrupted him. “The time for theorizing and yammering and pamphleteering is over. You were brought here because I have a message and I need a messenger. The time has come for action. Tell your superiors. Tell the world. The Naked Brains must be destroyed.”

A sense of determination flooded Rudy’s being. This was what all his life had been leading up to. This was his moment of destiny.

Which made it particularly ironic that it was at that very moment that the Fist smashed in the door of the laboratory.

Radio Jones had punched a hole in the center of a sheet of paper and taped it to the casing of her all-frequencies receiver with the tuner knob at the center, so she could mark the location of each transceiver set she found. The tuner had a range of two hundred ten degrees, which covered the entire spectrum of the communications band. So she eyeballed it into quarters and then tenths, to give a rough idea how things were laid out. It would be better to rank them by electromagnetic frequency, but she didn’t have the time to work all that out, and anyway, though she would never admit this out loud, she was just a little weak on the theoretics. Radio was more a vacuum-tube-and-solder-gun kind of girl.

Right now the paper was heavily marked right in the center of the dial, from ninety to one-sixty degrees. There were dozens of flier-Brain pairs, and she’d put a mark by each one, and identified a good quarter of them. Including, she was particularly pleased to see, all the big guys — Eszterhazy, Spindizzy, Blockhead O’Brien, Stackerlee Brown. When there wasn’t any room for more names, Radio went exploring into the rest of the spectrum, moving out from the center by incremental degrees.

So, because she wasn’t listening to the players, Radio missed the beginning of the massacre. It was only when she realized that everybody in Edna’s had rushed out into the street that she looked up from her chore and saw the aeroplanes falling and autogyros spinning out of control. She went to the window just in time to hear a universal gasp as a Zeppelin exploded in the sky overhead. Reflected flames glowed red on the uplifted faces.

“Holy cow!” Radio ran back to her set and twisted her dial back toward the center.

“… Warinowski,” a Naked Brain was saying dispassionately. “Juric-Kocik. Bai. Gevers…”

A human voice impatiently broke in on the recitation. “What about Spindizzy? She’s worth more than the rest of them put together. Did she set off her bomb?”

“No.” A long pause. “Maybe she disarmed it.”

“If that’s the case, she’ll be gunning for me.” The human voice was horribly, horribly familiar. “Plot her vectors, tell me where she is, and I’ll take care of her.”

“Oh, no,” Radio said. “It can’t be.”

“What is your current situation?”

“My rockets are primed and ready, and I’ve got a clear line of sight straight down Archer Road, from Franklin all the way to the bend.”

“Stay your course. We will direct Amelia Spindizzy onto Archer Road, headed south, away from you. When you see her clear the Frank Lloyd Wright Tower, count three and fire.”

“Roger,” the rocket-assassin said. Now there was no doubt at all in Radio’s mind. She knew that voice. She knew the killer.

And she knew what she had to do.

Amelia Spindizzy’s ears rang from the force of the blast, and she could feel in the joystick an arrhythmic throb. Where had the missile come from that had caused the explosion? What had happened to Eszterhazy? She was sure she had not accidentally pressed the red button on the joystick, so he should be fine, if he had evaded the blast. Hyperalert, Amelia detected an almost invisible scratch in the air, tracing the trajectory of a second rocket, and braced herself for another shock.

When it came, she was ready for it. This time she rode, with her whole body, the great twisting thrusts that came from the rotor, much as she would ride a stallion or, she imagined, a man. The blades sliced the air and the autogyro shook, but she forced her will on the powerful machine, which had until this instant been her partner, not her opponent, and overmastered it.

It might be true that you never see the missile that kills you. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t be killed by a missile you could see. Amelia needed to get out of the line of fire — a third missile might err on the side of accuracy. She banked sharply down into Archer Road, past the speakeasy and the storefront church, and pulled a brisk half-Eszterhazy into an alley next to a skeleton of iron girders with a banner reading FUTURE HOME OF BLACK STAR LINE SHIPPING & NAVIGATION. All that raw iron would block her comptroller’s radio signal, but that hardly mattered now. At third-floor level, slowing to the speed of a running man, she crept, as it were, back to where she would see what was happening over the Great Square.

Eszterhazy was nowhere in evidence, but neither was there a column of smoke where she had seen him last. Perhaps, like herself, he’d held his craft together and gone to cover. Missiles were still arcing through the air and exploding. There were no flying machines in the sky and the great Zeppelins were sinking down like foundering ships. It wasn’t clear what the missiles were aimed at — perhaps their purpose at this point was simply to keep any surviving ’planes and autogyros out of the sky.