The Butterfly Kid

12

ANYHOW, THERE I was, tied hand and foot to a pillar in the middle of the loft, being surveyed with varying kinds and degrees of avid interest by two blue lobsters and Laszlo Scott.

One of the lobsters — they all looked alike to me — said something that sounded like popcorn popping, and the other lobster went away. I could hear him, out in the hall, pushing heavy packing cases around like so much air. I worried.

“Yes indeed,” the remaining lobster said. “We know how to deal with spies. Oh my, yes.”

“Kill the wiseass mother,” Laszlo hinted. “C’mon, Chief, tear ’im up. Yeah, man, yeah! Kill the bastard.”

Being basically unprepared to believe in a pacifist lobster, I expected it to act on Laszlo’s suggestions, but, “Oh my, Laszlo Scott!” the lobster quaked, turning light azure in distress. “Kill? You know…” It couldn’t go on.

This was encouraging. Getting killed would’ve spoiled my chances to foil the lobsters’ plot, among other things, and getting killed with Laszlo in the audience would’ve been distressing. Instead, I allowed myself to hope. Hope is good for you.

Still shaken by the thought of killing, the lobster said, “Excuse me, please,” and went out to the hall to consult, like a snare drumming contest, with its colleague. This left me alone and helpless with Laszlo.

“Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!” he chanted, war-dancing around me in clumsy circles. “Now you’re gonna Get It, an’ I’m Glad! Nyah!”

“Cool it,” I said.

“Nyah!”

The lobsters were wheeling large electronic devices into the loft, most likely for my entertainment. I gave them all my worried attention, leaving Laszlo to his own damp devices.

He went on nyahing furiously for a while, until he saw that I wasn’t watching. “Nyah?” he said.

He looked furtively about and saw that the lobsters weren’t watching him, either. (By then, knowing Laszlo, I was.) He clenched his pudgy fist, shouted Nyah! lunged for my solar plexus — and was gone! Of this, at least, I heartily approved.

But, “Hey?” came a frightened Laszlo noise from overhead. I looked up, grinned, and said a nyah or two of my own. Laszlo was spread-eagled on the ceiling, face down, and his terror and discomfort were a pleasure to behold.

“Now there, youthful Laszlo,” said the English-speaking lobster solemnly, “you know you ought not do such things. Feel shame, Laszlo Scott, transgressor: feel regret.”

After the briefest little resistance, he obviously felt just that.

I, on the other hand, suddenly felt a good deal more respect for these blue crawdads than I’d meant to. That levitation stunt was even more impressive than Sean’s butterflies. How, I wondered, had such highly gifted lobsters taken up with Loathsome Laszlo? And why?

“Violence,” the lobster went on sternly, “is intrinsically bad. Say that.”

He didn’t want to and he tried not to, but, “Violence is intrinsically bad,” he choked out just the same.

“Very good. Now believe it,” the lobster ordered.

Saying to myself, “Oh Yeah?” I watched Laszlo’s putty face go through uncommon changes for almost a minute, until, against his own will and most likely without knowing what intrinsically meant, he obviously believed, without the slightest reservation, that violence is intrinsically bad.

“That’s better,” said the lobster. Laszlo sank slowly, feet first, to the floor.

I was impressed. Anyone who could do a thing like that to a thing like Laszlo was clearly someone to reckon with. Furthermore, I recalled with a start, I myself was about to have to reckon with that someone. This did not comfort me.

Still, I wasn’t as worried as I had been. I couldn’t believe that so firm, deep-rooted, and irrational a prejudice against violence was likely to prove healthy on this planet. And nothing, I hoped, is intrinsically anything.

“Nyah?” I asked Laszlo when he reached the floor, but he didn’t answer me. He just looked at me wide-eyed and scared, and then skittered off to someplace out of sight. I nearly laughed.

Then it was my turn.

“What is your name, Spy?” the lobster asked.

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to give him anything for nothing. Then I felt a pressure in my head, discomfiting rather than uncomfortable, a very gentle pressure, and I heard my mouth say, “Chester Anderson.” The pressure went away. Oh?

“Indeed. And I am Ktch. I am in charge here.” I didn’t doubt it for an instant. “You shall answer my questions.”

I certainly hoped not, but the odds were on his side.

“What,” he said ill-advisedly, “do you do?”

After a moment of pressure, my mouth started telling him, in alarming detail, what I did. It began on the metabolic level describing with some oversimplification the process whereby I changed food into feces with myself as an inconsequential by-product. The lobster — Ktch — listened to all this drivel with rapt attention.

I stopped listening whilst my mouth was still describing the process of salivation, and discovered, to my delight, that I didn’t have to listen at all. My mind, that is to say, was not engaged in this activity. Aha. A possible weakness in the lobster’s plans.

I carefully imagined a hundred-piece rock-n-roll orchestra — fifty guitars, twenty basses, fifteen harpsichords and organs, five harmonicas, ten drummers drumming: all, including the drums, highly amplified — with a two-hundred voice chorus: an impressive ensemble. I set these three hundred imaginary noisemakers to work on “Love Sold in Doses,” one of Wild Bill Mosley’s better tunes, in a gloriously impractical endless arrangement I’d been toying with since 1966.

“I offered you riches an’ all of them things;

For all of your fingers I offered you rings;

To cover your body, silk fabric that clings:

And you gave me Love Sold in Doses.”

The noise inside my skull was something awesome, but my fool mouth was still chattering away. It had gotten to the treatment of fatty acids in the upper intestine, a basically uninspiring topic.

I turned my imaginary amplifiers up a notch. My idiot mouth rattled on. Maybe, I resigned myself, this wouldn’t work.

I turned the volume up another notch. Nothing happened. Up another two notches: nothing. With a subliminal shrug I turned the volume all the way up, so loud it should’ve been audible outside, thinking that if I couldn’t keep myself from talking, maybe I could kill myself with noise.

My mouth faltered, stumbled, hesitated, groped for a a master volume control set at one on a scale of one hundred.

Ktch’s feelers stood at attention. “You have stopped talking,” he complained in frictive tones akin to wonder. “Why have you stopped talking? Do not stop!”

The pressure in my head — hardly noticeable in all that din — increased sharply. My mouth began to say something. I turned the master volume control ever so slightly.

“What are you doing?” The lobster seemed upset. “Stop that, Spy. At once. Stop. You shall answer my questions, Spy, you shall!”

The pressure increased. So did the volume. I could play this game all night.

Ktch began to pale, a charming sight. His feelers wilted slightly and his eyestalks twisted themselves into a true lover’s knot. His claws clicked nervously.

I noticed he was clicking his claws in time to “Love Sold in Doses.” Groovy! So I wrote in a lobster-claw obbligato.

Halfway through his big solo Ktch realized what he was doing. “Stop that, Spy!” he commanded, clicking brilliantly. He doubled the pressure and I turned the volume up to five.

Then, aside from his claws, Ktch went as limp as a lobster can and turned as pale as New York City milk. “There are twelve of us here,” he said flatly.

“We have always worked in teams of twelve. It is our tradition. Four chemists, three zenologists, three technicians, one communicator, and one coordinator. I am the coordinator. I am called Ktch.”

And then, so help me Dylan, while “Love Sold in Doses” thundered in my skull and Ktch’s claws clicked time, he told me Everything. It took awhile.

“After four months of group study, we developed the proper weapon, which you call, I believe, Reality Pills. Then we cultivated a vector, Laszlo Scott, a typical member of your species.” I let that pass.

He explained how the weapon was made — a process I didn’t understand but carefully memorized — and how it worked.

“It does no harm, of course. We cannot do harm. It merely generates confusion, disorder, anarchy — you might call it chaos. Whereupon we intervene to restore order. Always. We are often hailed as heroes.”

The explanation was long-winded, and I was getting sick of “Love Sold in Doses,” which, for all its hip innuendos, is, after all, just another tune. So I turned the volume up to ten.

“This project is organized in three phases,” he went on hurriedly. “Individual testing, mass testing, and diffusion. We have finished phase one, the individual testing, with completely satisfactory results, as usual. We always have completely satisfactory results.”

At this point, “Hey, Chief, wha’s happenin’?” Little Laszlo chose to manifest himself again. “Why you tellin’ him all that stuff, huh?”

“Love Sold in Doses” collapsed. So did Ktch. Pity.

“How did you do that?” For a lobster, he sounded downright respectful.

I shrugged my shoulders eloquently. A wisp of pressure began to make itself felt in my head, then turned tail and ran away. Groovy.

“Laszlo Scott, why did you not tell me about this?”

“ ’Bout what, man? Why didn’ I tell you…”

“Yes. I must think about you, Laszlo Scott. Also about you, Spy. I — no, We have been misinformed. Something must be done. Yes. Come with me.”

He led Laszlo out of the room. I whistled “Love Sold in Doses” hopefullishly.

“Stop that!” the lobster yelled. I did. Why not?

Laszlo and the lobster were away some fifteen minutes, during which I wondered where the hell my beloved roommate, manager, and master planner was. I also noticed, for the first time in awhile, that I was disgracefully wet and beginning to smell, and that I still hadn’t had lunch. I wove these three themes into a disgruntled fugue and waited for further developments.

Somewhere in the near distance a voice, probably Laszlo’s, made odd sounds expressive of distress. This was little comfort.

Then Ktch came back. Alone. He’d got his deep blue color back and his eyestalks untangled, but he looked, to say the least, a bit offended.

“What you did,” he said hurtly, “why can Laszlo Scott not do the same? Were you taught to do this? Where did you learn it?”

I whistled another half-bar of “Love Sold in Doses.”

“No,” he surrendered.

Out of unabashed nastiness and the absence of lunch, I whistled through the whole tune once, with flourishes. He kept time with his claws.

“I’m afraid,” he said when I was quite through, “that I shall have to resort to methods I myself deplore. But you are too strong for our usual procedures. Quite unexpectedly strong. Nothing had prepared us for… Ah, well. You yourself have forced us to this point. We shall have to use torture, alas.”

Torture?

“Of course, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world,” Ktch explained, while setting up the electronic devices I’d worried about earlier. “In fact, I don’t believe I could, really. Just thinking about it makes my eyestalks twitch. Conditioning, you know. There.”

He flipped a switch. The devices — there were four of them that I could see, all very bulky, gray, and ominous, with lots of knobs and dials and, on the biggest one, silvery thin tentacular extrusions that were probably going to be attached to me somehow — the devices hummed rather threateningly, lights lit up and flashed or not as they saw fit, a psychedelic op-art disk on the tentacled device rotated with obvious hypnotic intent, and the air around me suddenly grew heavy. Ktch looked as pleased as an azure lobster can.

“These won’t actually hurt,” he said. “That is, there’s no physical pain involved.” He started attaching tentacles to me. “Of course, if you choose to interpret the sensations they produce as pain — and you probably will — well, that’s your doing, not ours.”

There were lots of tentacles, and he fastened them to me in all sorts of unlikely places, many of them personal. I kept a stiff upper lip and wondered where Mike was.

“This is the first time we’ve used these instruments here,” he apologized at last. “With Laszlo Scott they were not needed — or so we were led to believe. In fact, the last creatures we used these on were amphibious, if that’s the word for it, and had four sexes. A charming arrangement but quite impractical. One is best, or at the most three, but Four…” He waved a fluent feeler in mock despair, while I silently vetoed his opinions.

“Anyway,” he went on, “the calibration is perhaps a trifle rough. I’m sorry about that. We’ll watch your reactions and refine our settings, but that will take some time. Here goes.”

He flipped another switch, I braced myself, and the torture commenced. Like everything else so far, it was impressive, if that’s the word for it. Yeah, impressive.