The Arsenal Files 8/The Arsenal Files Collection #8 (Arsenal Computer) (1996).ISO/doorware/rubyv61.zip/RUBY61-2

Text File | 1996-09-30 | 19KB | 334 lines

Copyright (c) 1996

                          PRIVATE ZOO
                           (Part Two)
                         by Colin Dale

     The episode with Brad had buoyed his spirits, but by the
time Frank finished his lunch and made it back to his office he
was deeply concerned, and he stayed that way the rest of the
afternoon, the second floor of the Maxwell building that he had
hoped to complete sitting temporarily forgotten on his drawing
board.  It was painfully obvious that he had a serious problem.
Two, if he counted Maxwell, but one thing at at time.  Since it
was apparent that people weren't really turning into animals -
Christine hadn't pointed and screamed, "There's a giant turtle in
here!", or even words to that effect - he, Frank, was - well,
let's not mince words - seeing things.  Nothing like this had
every happened to him before, or to anyone else that Frank knew
of.  And it was getting worse.  From time to time he glanced out
his window and saw other animals walking among the people below.
He saw a racoon getting out of a taxi, a frog driving a bus and,
if those weren't strange enough, a dog walking a dog.  They all
behaved like humans, with minor variations depending on the
animal: a snake on a park bench held a newspaper in its coils; a
bald eagle strolled casually along the sidewalk, and an octopus
held its girlfriend in an eight-armed embrace.  After the
spectacle stopped scaring Frank out of his wits it actually began
to fascinate him, and he was still staring out the window when he
heard a gentle knock on the door.  With difficulty he tore
himself away from the scene and went to answer it.
     "Thank you very much for agreeing to see me, Mr. Davis,"
said the bat hovering on the other side.
     Frank recoiled, but managed to disguise it as stepping aside
for the bat to pass.
     "Come in, Mr. Krebs," Frank said, noting the rolled-up
drawings that the bat held carefully in its claws.  "I'm sorry if
I kept you waiting; I didn't realize that it was three o'clock
already."  He blinked, but couldn't manage to see Krebs.  Well,
it wasn't a huge problem in itself.  He supposed that this bat
wouldn't try to bite him or emit ear-shattering ultasonic
shrieks.  "What can I do for you?"
     Krebs the bat flapped into the office, landed on Frank's
desk and spread his drawings on it.  "I can't figure out how to
reconcile safety with our client's wishes," he said.  "He wants
no more than four pillars on each floor of his parking garage -
to leave more room for paying customers, naturally - but I can't
make the thing stand up with fewer than six.  Do you have any
suggestions?"
     Frank rounded the desk to stand on the other side of the
bat, then thought better of it and rounded it again to stand
beside him.  After all, he chided himself, even if it did look
like a small flying mammal, it really was Krebs underneath.  Or
inside.  Or whatever.  He leaned over the drawings and said,
"Where are your supporting walls?"
     The bat lowererd its head until its nose was less than two
inches off the drawing and squinted.  "Here," it said, pointing
with a wingtip.
     "And what's this?"  Frank asked.
     The bat leaned and squinted again.  "The elevator shaft," it
supplied.
     Frank had a sudden thought.  "Mr. Krebs, how is your
eyesight?"
     Krebs grinned self-consciously, a somewhat disturbing
expression on the face of a bat.  "Terrible," he admitted.  "I
have astigmatism, so even with glasses I have to get really close
to see anything clearly.  Without them, of course, I'm blind
as..."
     "Don't say it," Frank cut him off.

                         *   *   *

     He managed to get rid of Krebs quickly enough - it was a
fairly simple problem to solve, although Krebs muttered
"brilliant" all the way out the door - and spent the rest of the
afternoon nervously counting down the minutes until five-thirty,
when Maxwell was due to arrive.  His hallucinations were becoming
worse by the minute.  In the two hours between his interviews
with Krebs and Maxwell he counted exactly six people who still
looked human, and saw so many animals that he began to see
repeats.  There were two giraffes - basketball players, no doubt
- four leopards, and, absurdly, a whole school of fish flopping
their way across the road.  Grade school kids, he decided.
     With difficulty Frank tore himself away from the window and
turned his attention to the task at hand.  What was he going to
do about Maxwell?  Hopefully something that would keep his client
from pulling the plug on nearly six weeks of twelve-hour days.
Maxwell had expressed his extreme displeasure with Frank's work
before - Frank could almost set his watch by it - but always over
the phone, never in person, and he had never actually threatened
to cancel the project.  Frank had no doubt that Maxwell was
capable of doing just that - he was as rich as Howard Hughes and
almost as eccentric.  For all Frank knew, the man might see
people as animals himself, judging from the way he seemed
completely out of touch with the real world.  The last thing
Frank needed was to be distracted by whatever animal Maxwell
would become when he would need to marshall all of his
concentration to try and guess what that tangled, twisted mind
wanted to hear.  He had been successful up to now, but whether he
would be able to pull it off again was entirely up in the air.
     He was still puzzling it over when there was a knock at the
door and Christine poked her brown, fuzzy head through it.
     "Mr. Maxwell is here," she said.
     "Thank you, my deer - uh, dear," Frank replied.  "Show him
in, please."
     Christine retreated and two men came into Frank's office.
At least he assumed they were men.  The man-sized lizard moved
forward to shake his hand.
     "Mr. Davis, I'm Herman Huntress, Mr. Maxwell's attourney.
I'll be sitting in on his meeting."
     His attourney.  Well, Frank would have expected a shark, but
a lizard wasn't too much of a surprise. He shook the lizard's
hand as briefly as he could.  It was cold and clammy, but at
least it wasn't covered in slime.  "Pleased to meet you," he
said, then paused.  "I'm sorry, but did you say that your last
name was Huntress?"
     The lizard blushed, its whole body seeming to redden.  "Yes
it is," it said, and didn't offer anything more.
     "Don't waste time, Heman!" the giant rodent-like animal
behind him said in an all-too-familiar voice. "I can't stand
people who waste time! I didn't get where I am by wasting time!"
     "Mr. Maxwell, it's a pleasure to finally meet face-to-face,"
Frank said, offering his hand to it.  For the first time since
this whole nightmare had begun he found himself unable to
identify the animal he was seeing.  It was man-sized and walked
erect, but Frank suspected that his imagination was distorting
it, as it had done with Brad the six-foot turtle.  This animal
was almost certainly quadrupedal, and probably no bigger than a
squirrel, which it resembled but wasn't.  It had a small, flat
head, grey fur all over its body and a long, bushy tail that it
held vertical rather than let it drag on the ground.  It seemed
tantalizingly familiar to Frank, but he couldn't for the life of
him imagine where he had seen one before.
     "What are you looking at?" the animal snarled.  "Do I have
something stuck in my teeth?"
     Maxwell certainly did have very numerous and very sharp
teeth, but there was nothing stuck in them that Frank could see.
"Sorry," he mumbled.  <I was just wondering what you look like as
a human, or if I'll ever find out.>  He gestured toward the two
extra chairs he had brought in.  "Why don't we all sit down?
Would you or Mister, ah, Huntress like some coffee?"
     The lizard opened its mouth to say yes, but the whatever-it-was
cut him off.  "Well of *course* we don't want coffee!" it snapped.  "Why
do you think we'd want coffee?  It's five thirty-five already and you
offer us coffee!  Don't you know *anything*?"
     That seemed to make sense to Maxwell, because he gave a
satisfied nod and flopped into a chair, carefully curling his
tail around his waist to sit in a neat pile in his lap.
Huntress, back from his embarrassed red to a more normal shade of
green, followed suit.  Frank took his seat behind his desk,
trying not to stare at Maxwell.  His inability to identify the
animal Maxwell had become grated on his nerves.
     "Well, Mr. Maxwell," he began as cautiously as he could,
"what seems to be the problem with my design for your building?
I thought we'd worked out everything to your satisfaction in our
last discussion over the phone."
     The lizard cleared its throat.  "My client feels that..."
     "Everything is wrong!" Maxwell cut in.  "Absolutely
everything!  I looked at those sample drawings that secretary of
yours faxed to me, and I was appalled, yes, appalled," he
repeated, as if liking the sound of the word, "*appalled* at how
thoroughly you've managed to miss the mark!"
     "Can you give me an example?"
     "You tell me!" the - what the Hell *was* it? - demanded
challengingly.
     Frank considered.  "Last time you expressed concern about
the elevators..."
     "Ah, yes!  The elevators!" Maxwell nodded emphatically.
     "...but," continued Frank, "I believe my last set of
drawings clearly showed that all the elevators connect exactly
two floors each and no more, as you requested."  He winced at the
memory of the trouble that particular eccentricity had caused
him.  To connect the sixty floors of the building Frank had,
insanely, been forced to use sixty elevators, located randomly on
each floor and connected by moving sidewalks.  It would probably
take most of a day to get to the top, but at least then you could
get down significantly faster via the waterslide that wound its
way around the outside of the building.
     "Completely unacceptable!" Maxwell snapped.  "The elevators
are in the wrong positions on each floor!  You'll have to design
each and every floor and put them in the new places!"
     "You can't be serious!"
     "Mr. Maxwell is serious, and advises that..."
     "Shut up, Herman!" Maxwell cut off the lizard, which blushed
over its whole body again, this time a deep shade of purple.
"And then there are all the *other* problems!"
     "Such as?" said Frank.
     "Such as that *mess* you made of the forty-ninth floor!"
     "But you said it was perfect last time!" Frank protested.
"You said that since forty-nine was the square of a prime number,
seven, the dimensions of all the rooms must also be perfect
squares of primes, and that's exactly what I did!  Seven feet by
seven feet, nineteen by nineteen, thirty-one by thirty-one, and
so on.  You said the dimensions were perfect!"
     Huntress hesitantly cleared his throat to try again.  "My
client felt that it would be clear to you that the dimensions
should be in *cubits*, not feet.  Furthermore, he feels that..."
     The rodent-like animal - Frank wished he could place what it
was - rounded on Huntress and gnashed its teeth at him.  "One
more word out of you, Herman, and you'll regret it!  I brought
you here as a favour to your mother, but if you try once more to
tell Mr. Davis how I feel, I'll tear your throat out!"
     Huntress went so pale that to Frank he actually seemed to
turn white.  No, Frank corrected himself, the lizard didn't just
*seem* to be turning white, it *was* turning white, and suddenly
Frank realized why.  Huntress wasn't just a lizard but a
chameleon, and had already changed colour twice without Frank
picking up on it.  This sudden insight, along with what Maxwell
had just said, led Frank to another conclusion, and he blurted it
out before he could stop himself.
     "You're not really a lawyer, are you, Mr. Huntress?"
     "Well of *course* he's not a lawyer!" Maxwell said as if it
was the most obvious thing in the world.  "My idiot nephew here
has failed the bar exam seven times in seven years!  My sister
makes me drag him along to my meetings to give him some quasi-legal
experience, but she should have known that she would be
incapable of bearing live young when she maried a man with a
ridic-tik-tik-tik-ulous name like  Huntress'!"
     The chameleon, looking as if it wanted to dig a hole and
hide, did the next best thing, turned the same colour as its
background and faded completely from view.  Maxwell turned back
to Frank.
     "Now that we won't be bothered by any more legal trick-tik-tik-tik-ery,"
he said, his eyes narrowing, his tail bristling and small flecks of foam
beginning to spray from between his clenched teeth, "let's get back to
my building!  I want answers from you, and I want them
quick-tik-tik-tik!"
     <What's happening to his voice?>, Frank wondered.  Maxwell had
never said anything like  tik-tik-tik' on the phone, even at his
most agitated. <It must be the sound than animal makes>, he
realized.  He wished he knew what animal it was, as it could very
well give him the clue he needed to get Maxwell off his back, if
the way that Huntress' colour-changing had helped him deep-six
that particular threat was any indication.  Somehow the sound
seemed familiar, as if he'd heard it years before and forgotten.
He cast his mind back...
     A *mongoose*.
     Of course!  When his children were younger Frank used to
read to them from Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book", and their
favourite story had been the one about the mongoose, called Riki
Tiki Tavi after the sound he made.  Frank had never actually seen
a real mongoose, which was why he hadn't recognized Maxwell, but
there was no doubt that that was what he was.  Frank didn't know
offhand how he was going to use this new piece of information,
however, because Maxwell was glaring at him waiting for an
answer.
     "What other aspects of the building don't meet with your
approval, Mr. Maxwell?"  Frank asked, stalling for time.  If
memory served, mongooses - mongeese?  No, mongooses - were famous
for their ability to fight and usually defeat cobras and other
poisonous snakes, by virtue of their quickness, agility and
lightning-fast reflexes.
     "You of all people should be able to figure that one out!"
Maxwell snapped at him.
     Frank thought furiously, trying to remember everything he'd
ever read about mongooses.  He knew that they fought snakes by
getting between them and their burrows, to keep the snake from
running - slithering? - away.  They carefully measured the
snake's striking distance - it was the same as the height to
which the snake reared up its head - inched into it to lure the
snake into striking...
     "Well, Davis?" Maxwell prodded.  "I'm waiting!"
     ...then dodged out of the way and went for the throat before
the snake could get its guard back up.  Suddenly Frank realized
that that was what Maxwell was doing.  He was goading Frank into
mentioning a potential problem with the building and then jumping
all over him.  The bastard probably didn't have any objections to
the design at all, and was just being contrary for the sake of
being contrary.  Well, two could play at that game. <Let's see
what he does if the snake doesn't strike.>
     "I *could* tell you another problem with the building, Mr.
Maxwell," he said reasonably, "but wouldn't that be a needless
waste of time?  Why don't you tell me what's wrong?"
     "Because *everything's* wrong!  I told you that already!"
     "Then you shouldn't have any trouble giving me an example,
should you?"
     The mongoose's lips closed over its teeth and it began
nervously twisting its tail.  "There are hundreds of examples,"
it said stubbornly.  "How am I supposed to to just pick-tik-tik-tik one?"
     A beautifully devilish idea sprang into Frank's head.  "Why
not start at the bottom?" he suggested helpfully.  "Is there
something wrong with the reception desk at the main entrance, for
example?"
     "Yes!" shouted Maxwell, the relief evident in his voice.
"The reception desk!  It's the wrong colour!"
     "You mean you don't like green?"

     "That's right!  I hate green!  I can't believe you made it
green instead of pink!"
     Frank smiled.  <Got him.>  "Mr. Maxwell, the reception desk
isn't green, it's yellow.  Do you hate yellow, too?"
     The mongoose nodded.  "Absolutely!  I hate it even more than
green!  It clashes with the entire colour scheme of the
entrance!"
     "And how can it do that when it's in fact on the eighth
floor, as you requested?"
     Maxwell started violently.  "What do you mean it's on the
eighth floor?"  He was trying to maintain the vehemence in his
voice and not succeeding.  "I clearly instructed you to put it on
the third!"
     Frank sprung the trap.  "Mr. Maxwell, there's no reception
desk anywhere in the building.  You told me that if people didn't
know their way around then they had no business being there."
     "I said no such thing!" Maxwell contended, but the doubt in
his voice was unmistakable.
     "You did, and I have the tape recordings to prove it."
     Maxwell's eyes went wide.  "Tape recordings?"
     "Of our phone conversations."  Frank leaned forward.  "To be
perfectly honest with you, Mr. Maxwell, I don't think you've ever
looked at my designs for your building, and I don't think you
have any clear idea what it's supposed to look like.  If you
don't let me design your building as I see fit, I'll drag you
into court and sue you for breach of contract, and use those tape
recordings as evidence."
     A disembodied voice said, "He would have no legal grounds to
do that, Uncle..."
     "Shut up, Herman!"  Maxwell the mongoose unrolled his tail
from his lap and jerked to his feet.  "You think I'm insane,
don't you, Mr. Davis?" he snarled.  "Well, I'll show you!  You
design that building *exactly* how you want to, and I'll buy your
plans as per our contract, no questions asked!  Now, don't you
think you owe me an apology?"
     With difficulty Frank avoided laughing out loud as he said,
"I'm sorry, Mr. Maxwell.  I misjudged you."
     Maxwell gave a self-satisfied nod.  "Come on, Herman!  We're
going!"  He turned and stalked out of the office, and Huntress,
Frank could only assume, followed.
     <Piece of cake>, Frank thought as he closed the door behind
them.  That was the trouble with mongooses.  They were wonderful
counter-attackers, but if you could trick-tik-tik-tik them into
throwing the first punch they'd fall for the stupidest lie you
could dream up.

                    (to be concluded next issue)