Irontown Blues

Four

Any of my pulp-fiction heroes would have gone charging toward Irontown, trench-coat collar up against the drizzling rain, fedora riding casually on his head, his gat loaded with six lead pills and firmly jammed into the leather shoulder holster. However…

Ms. “Smith’s” disease was not going to kill her nor infect anyone else. There was no ticking time bomb. I could take my time, and ever since the Big Glitch, I always take time to study the situation before rushing headlong into danger.

No, I needed time to think, to come up with an approach. And when I need to think, there is one thing I do that usually helps with that. I moonlight as a bobby.

Our police force is layered, its functions divided.

None of the Eight Worlds has what you could call a standing army, though a few have small navies; in fact, since the Invasion no one has much of a military at all. Who would we fight? A space war might attract the attention of the Invaders, and nobody wants that. The last time they noticed us we nearly became extinct.

So though there are endless trade disputes and other reasons for any and all of the major planets to get angry about, war in space is impractical, no matter what the writers of thrillers might tell you. No one has even talked seriously about going to war with anyone in my lifetime, and for at least a century before.

Luna and some of the other planets have a voluntary paramilitary, strictly monitored and severely limited in scope, because rebellions, insurrections, uprisings, and even full-fledged revolutions have happened. There was a bad one on Oberon only ten years ago. Mars has had three violent upheavals since the Invasion. Luna had one about fifty years after the Invasion.

At the patrol level, police work largely consists of keeping order in the streets and rounding up felonious perpetrators… to use a bit of cop-speak. More commonly known around the precinct as the more technical term, dirtbags.

Then we get down to the level of misdemeanors, and we have a separate force for that, popularly known as bobbies. The equivalent back on Old Earth might have been traffic cops. We bobbies walk the corridors and the wide-open spaces, issuing summonses to litterbugs, jaywalkers, staggering drunks, and other menaces to society.

Okay, it’s not glamorous, but as the guy said whose job was to sweep up after the dinosaurs in the circus, at least I’m still in show business. So I’m still in police work.

I find it oddly relaxing to be out on patrol. As for Sherlock, it’s what he lives for. He loves it best when he tracks down the violator himself. After all, he is a bloodhound.

Sherlock is too obedient and far too smart to ever need something as gross as a leash, real or electronic. But the closest he comes to that indignity is when he is on the trail, or on the hunt. He lopes ahead of me, snuffling along the ground or hoovering great drafts of air into his mighty snoot, which is said to be one million times more sensitive than the human snoot and about four or five times more sensitive than any other dog breed.

The man I got him from as a puppy claimed the best bloodhounds “could track a mouse fart across a square mile of shit” and I’ve never had any reason to doubt that assessment. It is sheer pleasure to watch him cast about from right to left, left to right, to figure out which direction a fleeing desperado has run by the intensity of the scent he left behind.

He’s impossible to fool, and he never falls for any of the old traps, like spreading ground pepper or dried cat urine behind you. He detects that a mile away, from the tiniest trace, and just goes around it. Once in a great while a repeat offender gets an unexpected visit from me to explain the consequences of trying to hurt my dog. The explanation seldom results in broken bones but is apt to entail a little bruising. It never results in any charges against me. Sherlock is adored by all the regular cops in the neighborhood.

Today we were in hunt mode, not tracking, so his nose was held high, sampling the breezes. We weren’t looking for any particular person, we were seeking anybody who wasn’t in compliance. That can mean several things, but most of the time it is OAPH, Offences Against the Public Hygiene. Sherlock and I intended to catch a few reekers.

There can be a broad range of disagreement on what is a great smell, a good one, a neutral one, a bad one, a terrible one. But there are some that are almost universally loathed, never to be allowed out in public.

The list of these is surprisingly long, and every year it grows by a few as petitions are submitted and put to a vote concerning one scent or another. Right now Sherlock is authorized to seek out and report to me when he detects one of five hundred and seventeen distinct smells.

We live close together in a closed environment. There are dozens of layers of air scrubbing, of course, but no system like that is perfect. We simply can’t allow someone to pollute the environment that millions of people have to live and work in.

And wouldn’t you know it, if anything is forbidden, there are some people who will crave it intensely.

Many people were incensed (so to speak) at the narrow options for permissible odors, such as burning incense. Years ago they would hold “burn-ins,” and invite arrest, but it didn’t do them any good. They can still burn the nasty stuff at home, or as part of religious ceremonies in air-isolated and filtered churches.

Scenting oneself in various ways is quite an ancient custom. People have devoted their lives to the identification and concoction of exotic essences, but as more and more people were won over to the side of smeller’s rights, they saw one formulation after another put on the prescribed list. It eventually reached the point where only the blandest, most nearly undetectable perfumes were permitted.

The situation that prevails now seems to satisfy most people. You can wear scent at home, and there are clubs and bars and dance floors and such where you can drench yourself in Chanel #5.1 to your heart’s content, just as long as you shower thoroughly before you leave.

Another thing that should have surprised no one is that anything that is forbidden will acquire a cachet among some people, become a trendy thing, a hip thing, something that “everybody is doing.” The darkest side of the scent fetish involves something that you would think would appeal only to dogs, who seem to find the smell of other dogs’ butts to be endlessly fascinating, and probably quite wonderful. I’ve asked Sherlock about it, but as usual, he is silent on the matter.

But in police work you encounter pretty much any type of human behavior there is, and we are all aware of an underground that enjoys really nasty smells. It stays underground because most people don’t really want their neighbors to know that they host stench parties. Most citizens would be repulsed by the idea of people sitting around inhaling the smells of stale sweatsocks, vaginal yeast infections, and rotten fish.

When Sherlock picks up a scent, he comes as close as he ever does to losing control. He does everything but grab me by the trouser leg and pull me where he wants to go.

He never howls during the chase, but makes a high-pitched and almost inaudible whine. The game is afoot, Bach, he seems to say. Why are you lagging behind?

Now he raised his nose as high as it would go and tensed all over. In other breeds the ears would have stood up straight, but the best Sherlock can do with his enormous earflaps is shake them sharply, making a sound like a wet towel snapping.

Then he was off to the races.

Even though I was jogging, he quickly left me in the dust.

His limit is about fifty meters ahead of me. When he reaches that point, the GPS chip in his head gives him an alert, and he stops. If he is still casting around, he will come back to me, but if he is on the trail, he will just stop and wait for me to catch up, fidgeting impatiently. He never faces away from the scent. When I catch up, he resumes the track.

We only nailed one desperado. I was feeling vaguely depressed when we returned to the apartment. The whole purpose of wasting a day harassing the olfactory challenged was to come up with an approach to entering Irontown without endangering my one and only hide. I had come up blank.

I figured it was time to go to Mom for help.