Damon Knight - Orbit 17

“Well,” said Dr. Braddock, zitzing the school ring on its gold chain, “you might have a point there. I’m not sure I completely understand this. I haven’t worn some of these things since I was in high school.”

“If you’re a semanticist,” said the NG commander, “what good are you going to do here?”

“On the helicopter,” said Thayer (Chief Peck decided he’d call her Thayer), “I discovered that I know, in addition to theories of parallel verb structures, that that” —she pointed across the Bert’s Funland parking lot to a missile that had misfired—“is a solidfuel SAM missile with a nozzle velocity of twenty-three thousand pounds and a speed at apogee of fifteen hundred FPS, and that that —” she pointed at Rathmar, looked again and screamed, putting the back of her left hand to her mouth and her right arm out behind her. She leaped into Chief Peck’s arms, and he noticed how much she looked like Mala Powers.

“—is a stegosaurus, a Jurassic armored reptile that . . .” She looked up at Chief Peck, who was still holding her, with sudden revulsion. “I’m not scared,” she said as she realized she wasn’t scared. “So how about getting your hands off my body?” Peck let her go. He couldn’t help but notice that even if she was a brilliant scientist, she was still a beautiful and desirable woman.

“Enough of this dicking around,” said Dr. Braddock as she adjusted the rubber band on her ponytail. “Let’s get down to cases. The first thing we need to do is to analyze that thing’s blood.”

“Oh?” said Peck. “Why?”

“Because it’s the first thing you do in a situation like this,” said Thayer with an annoyed stamp of her tiny foot. “We’ll go into the emergency laboratory the National Guard will have set up in the science building of the local high school and I’ll look at it under an electron microscope. It could be that the creature could be killed by something simple, like sea water or a common Earth microbe, harmless to humans, but to which the creature has no immunity.”

“How do you get the blood sample?” said Peck.

“You walk up to the thing and shoot it with a bazooka.”

“I walk up?”

“You.”

Chief Peck had never fired a bazooka before, and he felt kind of silly hiding in the Chamber O’ Thrills in Bert’s Funland carrying one. He was hoping to sneak up behind Rathmar, and wasn’t counting on Rathmar sneaking up on him. Rathmar, unusually quiet for a 130-foot-high dinosaur, lowered his head and gave Chief Peck a friendly jostle from behind. One of the benefits of Peck’s not knowing much about bazookas was not knowing which way they fired. He was holding it backwards, which meant that when Rathmar snouted him and Peck got hysterical and pulled the trigger, the bazooka rocket discharged directly at Rathmar. It missed him, just about. It did blow off the end of his tail. Rathmar looked indifferently at his tail and went off to eat the Spider Ride.

“The son of a gun doesn’t bleed,” said Peck as he displayed the severed tail to Dr. Braddock and the NG commander. “Not a drop.”

“Then we can’t very well do an analysis on his blood, can we?” she said, sneering. “And about these flashing lights,” she added, looking about the laboratory. “Does anyone here have any idea what all these flashing lights do?”

“I don’t know that they do anything,” said a laboratory assistant. “It just doesn’t seem like a scientific laboratory without flashing lights.”

“Well, turn them off,” said Thayer. “They’re driving me crazy.”

“Couldn’t you do an analysis on the tip of the tail?” said Peck.

“That’s an idea,” said Dr. Braddock.

Several moments later she straightened up from her electron microscope. “The creature seems to have a structure,” she said gravely, “consisting of a latex material adhering to a net of chickenwire.”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” said Peck.

“Name anything that’s happened in the last forty-eight hours that has,” said the NG commander.

“Chief.” said a policeman, running in the door of the laboratory.

“Do you have good news,” said Peck, “or do you want to spend the next three years on night patrol in the stockyards?”

“It’s a giant tarantula. It’s eighty-five feet across and right now it’s climbing up the side of City Hall.”

“A giant tarantula,” said Peck.

“Yes,” said the patrolman. “The mayor’s really pissed off about it.”

“I think I see a pattern developing,” said Thayer, and bent back over the electron microscope.

By the time Chief Peck, Thayer and the NG commander and his troops got to City Hall, the thousands of spectators were calling the tarantula Gorg. It turned out that Gorg had walked down the main street of town on its way to City Hall, spinning gooey web stuff all over the place. The Chamber of Commerce was even more pissed off than the mayor.

“Well, Dr. Braddock,” said Peck. “What do we do about this?"

“How about diverting it with a seven-foot-tall fly?” said the NG commander. Everyone looked at him evilly. “Just a little comedy relief,” he said, playing self-consciously with his side arm.

“I didn’t think tarantulas spun webs,” said Peck as they watched the City Council run for its life.

“They don’t,” said Thayer. “That makes me suspicious.”

“A lot of good being suspicious does,” said Peck.

“I know what it is,” said the NG commander. “It’s a bad movie. It’s like being trapped in a bad movie, one of those science-fiction things on the late show that always had Peter Graves and Mala Powers in them.”

Thayer and Sam gave the NG commander dirty looks.

“No offense,” said the NG commander.

“Gerald Mohr was in a couple of them too, Mister Smarty Pants,” said Thayer.

Peck noticed then a small, innocuous man in a blue suit standing beside him, holding out an envelope to the police chief. He was smiling an apologetic smile.

“Timmy said to give you this,” said the little man.

“Timmy?” said Peck as he opened the letter. Inside was a note which read:

You are trapped in a bad movie. I can explain everything. Don’t ignore this unless you want things to get worse, follow this messenger.

It was signed, “Timmy.”

The little man kept smiling.

“This had better be good,” said Sam as the tarantula kept trying to climb the side of City Hall.

Sam drove, Thayer sat in the back seat and the little man, whose name, he said, was Mr. Brown (“Uh-huh,” said Sam privately), gave directions. The destination was a pleasant middleclass neighborhood of small, neat frame houses.

“We’re going to my house,” said Mr. Brown. “My wife and I live there. Timmy’s our son.”

Sam was instructed to turn down a street marked “Any Street USA.”

“Do you believe that?” said Thayer. “ ‘Any Street USA’?”

Sam said he was going to believe it this time, since he had a feeling there was going to be a lot of stuff later on he wasn’t going to believe, and he wasn’t going to sweat the small stuff.

The Brown residence looked like any other house on Any Street USA except for the high-pitched warbly whine that emerged from it and these... emanations, blue and green rays and stuff, that came out of the windows.

Mr. Brown took everybody into the house and introduced them to his wife, also small, also smiling apologetically.

The door to the refrigerator—it was a Crosley Shelvador— which had been open, closed. This revealed a boy of about thirteen who was peeling a banana Fudgesicle. “Hi,” said the boy as he strode past Thayer and Sam and went upstairs. As he passed, Sam saw that the kid was wearing a complete Hopalong Cassidy outfit.