Donald Westlake - Smoke

What? What? What?

The sandwich appeared to float in the open garage doorway, slowly converting itself into sludge as it oozed two feet lower. At last the transition from sandwich to sludge was completed, and Freddie started to turn away, to shut the garage door and go back to the house, and then he saw the bicycle.

Peter, being the calmer of the two, was elected to tell the story. "You all know," he began, "about Buffy and Muffy."

But then it turned out that, no, they did not all know about Buffy and Muffy. Seven of the eleven people in the room, including Robert and Martin, did know about the translucent cats and had seen them trotting around Peter and David's private quarters on the top floor of the research facility, but the other four had not, and so Peter had to start from the very beginning, and explain what melanoma was, and what science was, and what research was, and even what tobacco public relations was, all before finally getting to Buffy and Muffy, which didn't even begin to get them to Freddie.

It is very tricky for a naked man to ride a bicycle.

"He was a burglar," Peter said; they'd gotten that far at last. "He seemed like the answer to our prayers."

"If only we'd known," David said.

"Yes, but we didn't. And he did agree, we did have an agreement with the fellow."

"A crook," Robert said.

"Point taken," Peter admitted. Much of the tension had left him, now that he was getting it all off his chest. "Now," he said, "I'm afraid comes the difficult part, where I must say I do feel to some extent responsible. We both do. We share the blame."

"Thank you, Peter," David whispered.

Peter was again on the sofa, perched forward on the very edge of it, while David slumped back beside him. Peter took David's hand and squeezed it, and then said to the group, "We had these two formulae."

It was a thirty-gear bike, a virtual thesaurus entry of power and speed, adaptable to any terrain known to man; there was probably a gear for going across ceilings. Once Freddie'd figured out how to sit on the thing without pain or damage, it fairly flew along the verge.

These were country roads, and not heavily trafficked, but some vehicles used them. On an average of once every two minutes or so, a car, or more often a pickup truck, would come along, in one direction or the other, and the first few times Freddie tensed up a lot, waiting for who knew what to happen. After all, the people in those vehicles would be seeing a bicycle travel along beside the road all by itself, at a pretty good clip. The bicycle was on the right side, to go with the flow of traffic, but that was all that was even remotely right about it. (The sandwich sludge, growing fainter, was a minor element in the scene.)

So he'd expected cars to slam to a stop. He'd expected part of this exercise would be him from time to time racing away into the woods, or into the forehead-high cornfields, or otherwise eluding pursuers, before being allowed to proceed peacefully on his way. But in the first ten minutes of his journey half a dozen cars and trucks went on by, north- or south-bound, and nobody at all stopped, though he did see some surprised faces in passenger windows, and a couple of times he saw brake lights briefly flick on. But then every car or pickup continued on its way, some even faster than before.

Maybe country people, Freddie thought, are calmer than city people. Maybe they take odd things in stride, since living in the country is already such an odd thing to do. Maybe they figured it was a remote-control robot bicycle, like the remote-control robot airplanes that go sputter-sputter-sputter over every park in America in the summer, when you're trying to relax, or like those remote-control robot automobiles people give their kids at Christmas and the first thing the kid does is drive it into the tree and knock the tree over. Or maybe they were just people who mind their own business.

Well, no. Up ahead, the road dipped down, and then dipped up again, and then way up there it went around a curve. And that was where, headed this way, the police car appeared, coming around that curve, some kind of dark-colored state police car. No siren or lights or anything, but moving fast.

Somebody'd made a phone call.

To Freddie's right was a cornfield, the corn about five feet tall. The state-police car disappeared into the dip. Freddie turned right, and pedaled into the cornfield, as the state-police car reappeared, much closer.

They'd seen him, dammit; he heard them squeal to a stop. Sounds of car doors opening and closing. They couldn't see the bicycle, because it was shorter than the corn. And they couldn't see Freddie because they couldn't see Freddie. But Freddie could see them, two state troopers in uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats, conferring briefly beside their car.

Freddie, having driven fifteen or twenty feet into the cornfield, had turned left, and was now going between the rows, parallel to the road. There was almost room enough between the lines of corn plants for the bicycle, particularly if he held on to the handlebar in from the outer edge grips. The ground in here was hard as a rock, pretty smooth, and weedless; these are not organic farmers, you know.

Freddie worked his way through the gears until he found the one for cornfields, and then legged it, occasionally looking back toward the cops. They had apparently spotted his wheel tracks where he'd crossed the scrubland into the field, but once inside he'd left very little spoor on this hard dry soil; certainly not enough for anybody to track him. They were now moving around aimlessly back there, looking down.

What would the cops do next? They must have received more than one report about a bicycle traveling all on its own, because one report they would have figured was a nut. These two officers had been sent out to check into it. They'd seen the bicycle, or they'd seen something, far away and indistinct, and they'd seen it go into the cornfield. Now they'd look around in here for a while, and then they'd radio in that they thought they'd seen it but had lost it, and they'd be told there's no point hanging around, let's see if there's any more reports, and in any case a bicycle riding by itself doesn't actually break any man-made laws, only natural ones. So they'd go away.

That was Freddie's theory, anyway, and he liked it. What he didn't like was that, as he moved into the dip in the land, he saw that just ahead the cornfield gave way to pasture with cows in it, surrounded by barbed-wire fence.

There was nothing for it but to turn left and go back out to County Route 14. He was in the dip now, and the state-police car was out of sight. May it stay out of sight. Freddie coasted to the bottom of the dip, switched to the climbing-out-of-a-dip gear, and sped on.

There was no rearview mirror on this thing, unfortunately. Freddie had to keep looking back over his shoulder. Up to the top of the dip, and he saw way behind himself to the police car still stopped beside the cornfield. Around the curve he went, shifted into the good-level-road gear, and hit forty-five without working up a sweat.

Robert said, "Peter, if I didn't know you have no sense of humor—"

"Well, thank you very much."

"You're welcome. And if I hadn't seen those two ghostly cats of yours with my very own eyes, I would think, when you tell me an invisible man is on his way here to this house from the city, that you were pulling my leg."

David said, "Robert, I would give my leg for this not to be true."

One of the four who had just heard the whole story for the first time, a talent agent named Gerald, said, "Peter, what I still don't understand is, if you never considered using these potions togeth—"

"Formulae."

Gerald smirked a bit, but nodded. "Whatever you say, dear. If you never put these things together on purpose, in your lab, how can you be so sure what their combined effect might be?"