Dr. Bloodmoney (15 page)

He sold (another man made them) small electronic traps. Vermin had mutated and now could avoid or repel the ordinary passive trap, no matter how complicated. The cats in particular had become different, and Mr. Hardy built a superior cat trap, even better than his rat and dog traps.

It was theorized by some that in the years since the war cats had developed a language. At night people heard them mewing to one another in the dankness, a stilted, brisk series of gruff sounds unlike any of the old noises. And the cats ganged together in little packs and—this much at least was certain—collected food for the times ahead. It was these caches of food, cleverly stored and hidden, which had first alarmed people, much more so than the new noises. But in any case the cats, as well as the rats and dogs, were dangerous. They killed and ate small children almost at will—or at least so one heard. And of course wherever possible, they themselves were caught and eaten in return. Dogs, in particular, if stuffed with rice, were considered delicious; the little local Berkeley newspaper which came out once a week, the Berkeley
Tribune
, had recipes for dog soup, dog stew, even dog pudding.

Meditating about dog pudding made Stuart realize how hungry he was. It seemed to him that he had not stopped being hungry since the first bomb fell; his last really adequate meal had been the lunch at Fred’s Fine Foods that day he had run into the phoce doing his phony vision-act. And where, he wondered suddenly, was that little phoce now? He hadn’t thought of him in years.

Now, of course, one saw many phoces, and almost all of them on their ’mobiles, exactly as Hoppy had been, placed dead center each in his own little universe, like an armless, legless god. The sight still repelled Stuart, but there were so many repellent sights these days … it was one of many and certainly not the worst. What he objected to the most, he had decided, was the sight of symbiotics ambling along the street: several people fused together at some pert of their anatomy, sharing common organs. It was a sort of Bluthgeld elaboration of the old Siamese twins … but these were not limited to two. He had seen as many as six joined. And the fusions had occurred—not in the womb—but shortly afterward. It saved the lives of imperfects, those born lacking vital organs, requiring a symbiotic relationship in order to survive. One pancreas now served several people … it was a biological triumph. But in Stuart’s view, the imperfects should simply have been allowed to die.

On the surface of the Bay to his right a legless veteran propelled himself out onto the water aboard a raft, rowing himself toward a pile of debris that was undoubtedly a sunken ship. On the hulk a number of fishing lines could be seen; they belonged to the veteran and he was in the process of checking them. Watching the raft go, Stuart wondered if it could reach the San Francisco side. He could offer the man fifty cents for a one-way trip; why not? Stuart got out of his car and walked to the edge of the water.

“Hey,” he yelled. “Come here.” From his pocket he got a penny; he tossed it down onto the pier and the veteran saw it, heard it. At once he spun the raft about and came paddling rapidly back, straining to make speed, his face streaked with perspiration. He grinned up at Stuart, cupping his ear.

“Fish?” he called. “I don’t have one yet today, but maybe later. Or how about a small shark? Guaranteed safe.” He held up the battered Geiger counter which he had connected to his waist by a length of rope—in case it fell from the raft or someone tried to steal it, Stuart realized.

“No,” Stuart said, squatting down at the edge of the pier. “I want to get over to San Francisco; I’ll pay you a quarter for one way.”

“But I got to leave my lines to do that,” the veteran said, his smile fading. “I got to collect them all or somebody’d steal them while I was gone.”

“Thirty-five cents,” Stuart said.

In the end they agreed, at a price of forty cents. Stuart locked the legs of Edward Prince of Wales together so no one could steal him, and presently he was out on the Bay, bobbing up and down aboard the veteran’s raft, being rowed to San Francisco.

“What field are you in?” the veteran asked him. “You’re not a tax collector, are you?” He eyed him calmly.

“Naw,” Stuart said. “I’m a small trap man.”

“Listen, my friend,” the veteran said, “I got a pet rat lives under the pilings with me? He’s smart; he can play the flute. I’m not putting you under an illusion, it’s true. I made a little wooden flute and he plays it, through his nose … it’s practically an Asiatic nose-flute like they have in India. Well, I did have him, but the other day he got run over. I saw the whole thing happen; I couldn’t go get him or nothing. He ran across the pier to get something, maybe a piece of cloth… he has this bed I made for him but he gets—I mean he got—cold all the time because when they mutated, this particular line, they lost their hair.”

“I’ve seen those,” Stuart said, thinking how well the hairless brown rat evaded even Mr. Hardy’s electronic vermin trap. “Actually I believe what you said,” he said. “I know rats pretty well. But they’re nothing compared to those little striped gray-brown tabby cats … I’ll bet you had to make the flute, he couldn’t construct it himself.”

“True,” the veteran said. “But he was an artist. You ought to have heard him play; I used to get a crowd at night, after we were finished with the fishing. I tried to teach him the Bach Chaconne in D.”

“I caught one of those tabby cats once,” Stuart said, “that I kept for a month until it escaped. It could make little sharp-pointed things out of tin can lids. It bent them or something; I never did see how it did it, but they were wicked.”

The veteran, rowing, said, “What’s it like south of San Francisco these days? I can’t come up on land.” He indicated the lower part of his body. “I stay on the raft. There’s a little trap door, when I have to go to the bathroom. What I need is to find a dead phoce sometime and get his cart. They call them phocomobiles.”

“I knew the first phoce,” Stuart said, “before the war. He was brilliant; he could repair anything.” He lit up an imitation-tobacco cigarette; the veteran gaped at it longingly. “South of San Francisco it’s, as you know, all flat. So it got hit bad and it’s just farmland now. Nobody ever rebuilt there, and it was mostly those little tract houses so they left hardly any decent basements. They grow peas and corn and beans down there. What I’m going to see is a big rocket a farmer just found; I need relays and tubes and other electronic gear for Mr. Hardy’s traps.” He paused. “You ought to have a Hardy trap.”

“Why? I live on fish, and why should I hate rats? I like them.”

“I like them, too,” Stuart said, “but you have to be practical; you have to look to the future. Someday America may be taken over by rats if we aren’t vigilant. We owe it to our country to catch and kill rats, especially the wiser ones that would be natural leaders.”

The veteran glared at him. “Sales talk, that’s all.”

“I’m sincere.”

“That’s what I have against salesmen; they believe their own lies. You know that the best rats can
ever
do, in a million years of evolution, is maybe be useful as servants to us human beings. They could carry messages maybe and do a little manual work. But dangerous—” He shook his head. “How much does one of your traps sell for?”

“Ten dollars silver. No State boodle accepted; Mr. Hardy is an old man and you know how old people are, he doesn’t consider boodle to be real money.” Stuart laughed.

“Let me tell you about a rat I once saw that did a heroic deed,” the veteran began, but Stuart cut him off.

“I have my own opinions,” Stuart said. “There’s no use arguing about it.”

They were both silent, then. Stuart enjoyed the sight of the Bay on all sides; the veteran rowed. It was a nice day, and as they bobbed along toward San Francisco, Stuart thought of the electronic parts he might be bringing back to Mr. Hardy and the factory on San Pablo Avenue, near the ruins of what had once been the west end of the University of California.

“What kind of cigarette is that?” the veteran asked presently.

“This?” Stuart examined the butt; he was almost ready to put it out and stick it away in the metal box in his pocket. The box was full of butts, which would be opened and made into new cigarettes by Tom Frandi, the local cigarette man in South Berkeley. “This,” he said, “is imported. From Marin County. It’s a special deluxe Gold Label made by—” He paused for effect. “I guess I don’t have to tell you.”

“By Andrew Gill,” the veteran said. “Say, I’d like to buy a whole one from you; I’ll pay you a dime.”

“They’re worth fifteen cents apiece,” Stuart said. “They have to come all the way around Black Point and Sear’s Point and along the Lucas Valley Road, from beyond Nicasio somewhere.”

“I had one of those Andrew Gill special deluxe Gold Labels one time,” the veteran said. “It fell out of the pocket of some man who was getting on the ferry; I fished it out of the water and dried it.”

All of a sudden Stuart handed him the butt.

“For God’s sake,” the veteran said, not looking directly at him. He rowed more rapidly, his lips moving, his eyelids blinking.

“I got more,” Stuart said.

The veteran said, “I’ll tell you what else you got; you got real humanity, mister, and that’s rare today. Very rare.”

Stuart nodded. He felt the truth of the veteran’s words.

Knocking at the door of the small wooden cabin, Bonny said, “Jack? Are you in there?” She tried the door, found it unlocked. To Mr. Barnes she said, “He’s probably out with his flock somewhere. This is lambing season and he’s been having trouble; there’re so many sports born and a lot of them won’t pass through the birth canal without help.”

“How many sheep does he have?” Barnes asked.

“Three hundred. They’re out in the canyons around here, wild, so an accurate count is impossible. You’re not afraid of rams, are you?”

“No,” Barnes said.

“We’ll walk, then,” Bonny said.

“And he’s the man the former teacher tried to kill,” Barnes murmured, as they crossed a sheep-nibbled field toward a low ridge overgrown with fir and shrubbery. Many of the shrubs, he noticed, had been nibbled; bare branches showed, indicating that a good number of Mr. Tree’s sheep were in the vicinity.

“Yes,” the woman said, striding along, hands in her pockets. She added quickly, “But I have no idea why. Jack is—just a sheep rancher. I know it’s illegal to raise sheep on ground that could be plowed … but as you can see, very little of his land could be plowed; most of it is canyon. Maybe Mr. Austurias was jealous.”

Mr. Barnes thought to himself, I don’t believe her. However, he was not particularly interested. He meant to avoid his predecessor’s mistake, in any case, whoever or whatever Mr. Tree was; he sounded, to Barnes, like something that had become part of the environment, no longer fully peripatetic and human. His notion of Mr. Tree made him uncomfortable; it was not a reassuring image that he held in his mind.

“I’m sorry Mr. Gill couldn’t come with us,” Barnes said. He still had not met the famous tobacco expert, of whom he had heard even before coming to West Marin. “Did you tell me you have a music group? You play some sort of instruments?” It had sounded interesting, because he, at one time, had played the cello.

“We play recorders,” Bonny said. “Andrew Gill and Jack Tree. And I play the piano; we play early composers, such as Henry Purcell and Johann Pachelbel. Doctor Stockstill now and then joins us, but—” She paused, frowning. “He’s so busy; he has so many towns to visit. He’s just too exhausted, in the evenings.”

“Can anyone join your group?” Barnes inquired hopefully.

“What do you play? I warn you: we’re severely classical. It’s not just an amateur get-together; George and Jack and I played in the old days, before the Emergency. We began—nine years ago. Gill joined us after the Emergency.” She smiled, and Barnes saw what lovely teeth she had. So many people, suffering from vitamin deficiencies and radiation sickness in recent times … they had lost teeth, developed soft gums. He hid his own teeth as best he could; they were no longer good.

“I once played the cello,” he said, knowing that it was worthless as a former skill because there were—very simply—no cellos anywhere around now. Had he played a metal instrument…

“What a shame,” Bonny said.

“There are no stringed instruments in this area?” He believed that if necessary he could learn, say, the viola; he would be glad to, he thought, if by doing so he could join their group.

“None,” Bonny said.

Ahead, a sheep appeared, a black-faced Suffolk; it regarded them, then bucked, turned and fled. A ewe, Barnes saw, a big handsome one, with much meat on it and superb wool. He wondered if it had ever been sheared.

His mouth watered. He had not tasted lamb in years.

To Bonny he said, “Does he slaughter, or is it for wool only?”

“For wool,” she answered. “He has a phobia about slaughtering; he won’t do it no matter what he’s offered. People sneak up and steal from his flock, of course … if you want lamb that’s the only way you’ll get it, so I advise you now: his flock is well-protected.” She pointed, and Barnes saw on a hilltop a dog standing watching them. At once he recognized it as an extreme mutation, a useful one; its face was intelligent, in a new way.

“I won’t go near his sheep,” Barnes said. “It won’t bother us now, will it? It recognizes you?”

Bonny said, “That’s why I came with you, because of the dog. Jack has only the one. But it’s sufficient.”