The Arsenal Files 8/The Arsenal Files Collection #8 (Arsenal Computer) (1996).ISO/doorware/rubyv62.zip/RUBY62-2

Text File | 1996-10-27 | 10KB | 185 lines

Copyright   1996

                          PRIVATE ZOO
                          (Conclusion)
                         by Colin Dale

     On the drive home Frank weighed his options.  His
hallucinations - no sense in calling them anything else - had him
deeply spooked, but, he had to admit, deeply intrigued as well,
and he certainly couldn't deny their usefulness, as the encounter
with Maxwell had drastically demonstrated.  There was now nobody
whom Frank didn't see as an animal, but the animal he saw always
reflected some aspect of their appearance or their personality.
In addition to Christine's legs and Maxwell's argumentativeness,
there had also been Mr. Johnson's big nose, represented by a
toucan, Mrs. Thomas' fancy clothes - a peacock - and George from
the mailroom's all-around stupidity - a dodo, of all things,
which had brought Frank another person's mail clutched tightly in
its beak.  Frank considered the possible causes of his
hallucinations and eliminated all but two:  he was dreaming or he
was going insane.  If he was dreaming it wouldn't matter what he
did next, but if he was going insane he needed to come up with a
course of action.
     He could do the stereotypical thing and begin screaming
nonsense about people turning into animals until the nice men in
white showed up to take him away.  He rejected that option out of
hand.  If he was going to become a raving lunatic he had had
plenty of opportunity to do it long before now instead of
resolutely keeping his cool and trying to act naturally whenever
he saw yet another animal.  He allowed himself a momentary flash
of pride at this.
     The second option was to voluntarily check himself into an
insane asylum - or whatever the politically correct term was
these days:  'center for the study and care of certified
goofballs'? - but that didn't seem to make much sense either.
The staff there would simply assume, not necessarily incorrectly,
that he was just having delusions, and besides, it wasn't as if
his hallucinations were dangerous, just unsettling.  He rejected
that option too, but kept it in reserve against his suddenly
getting the urge to dress in Edna's underwear and feed her and
the kids to the Moulinex.
     A third option was to do nothing and hope he got better (or,
perversely, to do nothing and hope he *didn't* get better).  This
was the most attractive one so far, and Frank seriously
considered doing it.  In the end he rejected it in favour of a
slightly modified version: he would do nothing except ask for
advice.  Personal as his problem was, Frank knew he wouldn't be
able to avoid sharing it with someone before he went completely
bonkers.  That left the only problem being who to tell.  He ruled
out everyone at the office at a sweep.  The only person there he
trusted was Christine, and he had already tacitly declined her
help by not telling her when he had the chance.  He couldn't tell
his psychiatrist, because he wasn't seeing one, although he
certainly would be within a few days should he imprudently tell
any one of his friends.  That left only his family as potential
confidantes.  Both parents were already dead, the result of their
having waited to have him until well into their forties.  Edna's
parents were still alive, but Frank hardly fancied the prospect
of his mother-in-law hearing about his hallucinations and
gleefully citing them as final and clinching proof that he should
never have married her precious daughter in the first place,
something which would surely happen sooner or later if Frank told
Edna.  He'd lost touch with his daughter Claudia somewhere in the
deep and tangled jungles of adolescence; he hoped to re-establish
contact at 21, but for the time being they were living in the
same house on completely different worlds.  And having eliminated
everyone else, Frank found himself stuck with telling...

                         *   *   *

     "Dan?" he said, poking his head into the TV room.
     The lemur playing Nintendo kept its large black eyes fixed
on the screen.  "What, Dad?"
     Frank came into the room and sat down beside it on the
couch, careful not to sit on its tail, for whatever good that
might do.  "Can we talk for a minute?"
     "Can it wait 'til after this game?"
     Frank, who knew from bitter experience how long his son
could make a game of Nintendo last when properly motivated, such
as by the prospect of a talk with his father, said, "Can you talk
and play at the same time?"
     "Sure," the lemur shrugged, its short, clawed fingers never
pausing in their dance over the control pad.  "What do you want
to talk about?"
     He sounded casual enough, but Frank recognised the telltale
buildup of tension in Dan's voice, ready to violently deny any
and all statements, accusatory or otherwise, that Frank tried to
make.  He quickly set his son at ease.
     "A guy at work asked me a hypothetical question," he began,
reciting the dialogue that he'd worked out in the car, "and I'd
like to run it by you.  It's kind of a game, and I want to see if
you come up with a different answer than I did."
     "Shoot," said Dan, the relief visible even on his furry
white face.  He always enjoyed games, as his current
preoccupation with blasting evil-looking robots to fragments was
once again demonstrating.
     "Suppose," said Frank, "that a person, wherever he went, saw
animals being substituted for people.  What do you think he
should do?"
     Dan thought for a few seconds, then said, "I give up.  What
should he do?"
     "No, no!" Frank said impatiently.  "It's not a puzzle with
one right answer, you're supposed to think about what you would
do!"
     "So what would *you* do?" Dan asked.
     "I don't know!" Frank replied exasperatedly.  "That's why
I'm asking you!"
     He realized, an instant too late to stop himself, that he
had just completely given himself away.  He held his breath, but
Dan, as Frank had hoped, was too young and too wrapped up in his
Nintendo to realize it.
     "Well," the lemur said, thoughtfully wrinkling its brow in
the middle of blowing up four robots one after the other in less
than a second, "I guess it would depend on what kind of animals
people were turning into.  Can you give me a few examples?"
     Well, Frank reasoned, in for a penny, in for a mile, or
however that went.  "The guy at work said that the animal each
person turned into would reflect some part of his or her
appearance or personality, so I guess if I was seeing people as
animals then my secretary might look like a deer, or Mrs.
Henderson next door might look like a pit bull."  She'd certainly
made a scary one.  Frank had been half-afraid that she was going
to bite him when he'd gotten out of his car.
     Dan laughed.  "She already looks like a pit bull!  Tell me
some more, Dad!  What would Mom look like?"
     "An elephant."
     "I can see that one, too!  What about Claudia?"
     "She's an armadillo.  I mean she would be an armadillo," he
hastily corrected himself.
     "I don't get that one," Dan frowned.
     "I think it's because of all that gel she puts in her hair
to make it bigger.  It makes it look like armor plating."
     The lemur laughed so hard that it almost let a killer robot
scuttle out of harm's way before sending it to join its brethren.
"It's true!  That's so true!" it guffawed.  "Tell me what I look
like, Dad!  What animal am I?"
     "A lemur."
     "What's that?"
     Frank looked his son up and down.  "A lower primate about
the size of a large cat.  It has forward-facing eyes and grasping
hands, like all primates, and white fur all over its body except
on its legs, which are black, and its tail, which is striped."
     "I don't get it.  Why is that a good animal for me?"
     Frank shrugged.  "Lemurs are arboreal and nocturnal, and you
like climbing trees and staying up past your bedtime."
     "Do not!" Dan said automatically.
     "I was just teasing," Frank said with a reassuring squeeze
of his son's shoulder.  "Now it's your turn.  If someone really
was seeing animals instead of people, what should he do to make
it stop?"
     "'Make it stop'?" Dan repeated, aghast.  "What do you mean,
'make it stop'?  Seeing people as animals would be just too cool
for words!  If I could do that, I'd be the luckiest guy in the
world!"
     And that, thought Frank, was that.

                         *   *   *

     After he'd tucked his lemur in for the night - exactly
fifteen minutes past its bedtime - kissed his armadillo goodnight
and climbed into bed beside his elephant, Frank lay awake
reflecting upon what had certainly been the most unusual day of
his life, and one that had emphatically broken his
record-challenging
six-hundred-straight boring day streak.  He wondered
how he would adapt to his new lifestyle.  He was lucky, at least,
that people's voices remained the same when they changed into
animals; he would unquestionably have had a lot more trouble
coping with a world where people spoke to him in animal hoots,
growls, and whistles.  As it was, he would have to rely on
identifying people solely from their voices, but he'd always
fancied he'd been rather good at that anyway.  Yes, he was going
to get along just fine, thank you.  No problems at all.
     He suddenly laughed out loud, nearly waking Edna in the
process.  She turned onto her side, narrowly missing braining
Frank with one of her tusks.  'No problems' indeed!  He really
was going insane!  Ah, well, if he was going to lose his mind, he
could think of worse ways to do it than turning the entire world
into his own personal menagerie. <Besides>, he thought, <I'll
probably wake up tomorrow and everything will be back to normal>.
And trying not to think about how disappointed he would be if
that happened, Frank Davis closed his eyes and let his wife's
quiet trumpeting lull him to sleep.

                               END