Chester Anderson - The Butterfly Kid

“…resting your eyes,” Mike completed wearily.

I might as well join the party. “Dear friends and fellow killers,” I proclaimed hoarsely, “henceforth the only water I shall drink is bottled spring water. This city water’s just too rich for my blood. Otherwise, what’s happening?”

Michael shrugged. “Nobody’s attacking us,” he conceded.

“Groovy! Let’s attack.”

And so much for strategy meetings.

Mike pulled the bus up on the beach and cut the motors. Hush! Suddenly the world was a very quiet place. I had forgotten quiet.

I could feel my ears stretching out to catch the nice, informative little noises they had been deprived of for so long. From the poleaxed look on Kevin’s face, I gathered that the stretching effect was moderately visible.

“What are you staring at,” I inquired pro forma.

“Me? Oh — nothing. I’m not staring at your… I’m not staring. Honestly!”

“Bigot.”

The beach had undergone some monumental changes. It had been brutally plowed over by countless extraterrestrial catastrophes. The tail of my quick-frozen friend, the Sensitive telepathic snake, cut diagonally across it to pass out of sight among the battered willows. Little Micky’s forgotten cannons had churned the sand up with too many pounds of futile high explosives. Ktch’s grab bag E.T. army had decorated the beach with scattered chunks of totally inexplicable litter. Unimaginable violence had scrawled its complex signature on what, a mere few hours ago, had been a paper-smooth and more or less deserted little beach, leaving it looking very like the children’s sandbox in Washington Square.

And Michael, like a mother hen in master sergeant’s clothing, was trying to maneuver our courageous band of flipped-out volunteers into something approximating orthodox platoon formation. But chemicals euphoria was having comically disastrous effects on martial discipline.

Everyone was suddenly exclusively concerned with his own Thing. (Come to think of it, so was Mike.) Andrew Blake had conjured up what could pass for the ghost of Henry James — barring unsuspected gaps in Andy’s memory — and was trying to get it to teach him how to write dirty books in pure 1890’s florid high style; but the ghost of maybe Henry James, concerned more with the subject than the style, insisted on asking blunt, unflorid questions that made Andy blush from beard to brow and rendered him extravagantly useless for Mike’s purposes.

Gary the cupiditous Frog and Harriet were happily projecting millions of enormous diamonds — but Gary’s looked suspiciously like paste. Consistency is such a charming accident!

Sativa was walking insecurely fifteen feet up in the air and looking unsure whether to enjoy the sport or cry. Karen was building a scale model of the Pyramid of Cheops in vanilla halvah. Sandi was assembling separate but equal layettes in dusty pink and blue, suggesting she might well be pregnant after all.

Leo was also constructing a scale model, Rodin’s “The Kiss,” out of a greenish-brown substance that looked like Persian hashish. Pat and Stu were removing gobs of this strange substance just a bit less quickly than Leo could put it on, while arguing in unknown tongues both seemed to understand.

Sean and Kevin were playing a lively game of anti-anti-missile missile, using genuine miniature anti-anti-missile missiles, with the score, while I watched them, pretty loudly tied.

What the hell? I put up a double of the Wanamaker organ and tossed off a few bright choruses of The Carman’s Whistle. Like they say: if you can’t run your tongue across them, merge with them.

None of this sat noticeably well with Brother Michael. His face was trying to register so many different disapprovals simultaneously it seemed frozen in a disbelieving blank. He was trying to shout, too, but he couldn’t make up his mind what to shout first, and nothing came out but a vaguely well-bred gurgle.

I could understand a lot of what Mike must be feeling. After all, we really weren’t in anything like fighting trim just then. A pair of moderately irritated nuns could’ve wiped us out one-handed. To test this thesis, I projected a pair of moderately irritated nuns, but they just sniffed disdainfully, rattled their beads, and strode off into the woods. Nevertheless, we were pretty grossly ignoring our mission, and something certainly ought to be done. I hoped Mike could figure out something to do.

But he didn’t have to. Three vulgarly well-armed military robots clanked out of the thicket, Sativa fell to the sand with a tentative squeal and an alarmingly tactile thump, and all our manic fun and games evaporated.

Well, nearly all. My mighty Wanamaker organ didn’t seem to want to go. The robots ground to a halt and made it overwhelmingly clear that they were waiting for me to get rid of my overdone playtoy before they’d state their transcendentally important business. This was terribly embarrassing.

I unimagined my music box in painstaking detail and nothing worth mentioning happened. The robots, chugging softly, continued to wait. Mike’s face found a single expression it could maintain, but not one I enjoyed. The rest of the gang stared at me as though the whole thing were all my fault.

I carefully wished the organ off to the deepest pit of hell, where it might even do some good. It tootled derisively and stayed put.

“All right, you guys,” I sneered. “Who’s the wise guy put a hex on me?”

Nobody giggled, not even the robots. Most of my erstwhile friends gave me the kind of smile you’re supposed to use only when visiting elderly relatives in mental wards. Michael’s left nostril twitched in Morse.

“Aw come on!” I was running out of temper. The last time that’d happened to me, I gave the Old Empire State Building such a punishing kick I had to walk on crutches for a week. Recalling that mistake, I gave the musical monster — that forty-nine-ton albatross — an experimental tap with my right boot.

PoP! like the emperor of soap suds. It was gone. Someone was unkind enough to cheer.

“Now are you satisfied?” I asked the air a few yards to the left of the lead robot. They all three hopped to pots-and-pans attention, and the one in front threw me a bell-like salute so crisp it would have turned a West Point kay-det mauve.

“T-X two-three beta, sir. Are you Galactic Grand High Marshal Anderson?”

I floated him a return for his salute, said, “At ease, things,” and allowed as how I might well be the institution he was seeking. I almost remembered having vaguely considered conjuring up some such gadgets to keep the lobsters occupied a few hours back, but I couldn’t even pretend to remember having done it; and besides, any hallucination of mine would’ve known I’m just too modest to put up with such inflated titles.

Still, “What can I do for you, gadget?” I asked kindly, not wanting to hurt the poor thing’s ferric feelings.

“Begging to report, sir. Armored details Toggle-Xylophone and Marshmallow-Buggywhip” (I could hear the military Michael gagging somewhere to my left, but I ignored him. Why should I use someone else’s secondhand phonetic alphabet?) “engaged units of the enemy at 2100 hours, killing three aliens and capturing nine, plus one humanoid associated with the enemy, sustaining only superficial damage and no casualties, sir.”

He shot off another of those tool-and-die salutes, which I alertly fielded and returned. “Well done, device,” I said, “well done,” in a warm and well-oiled tone calculated to win me the instant love of my troops. “Please bring in the prisoners.”

After another volley of precisely machined salutes, the three gleaming golems snapped about face and returned to the woods.