Death Ray Butterfly, Tom Lichtenberg [most read book in the world .TXT] 📗

won't be any inadvertent collapses of this galaxy, I can assure you, or any other galaxy for that matter. Subatomic particles are everywhere. You might say they are every thing. If there were to be some kind of shortage, now, that might make it interesting. As with blood, or livers, or fashionable leg bones.”

“Leg bones?”

“Or cheek bones”, if you prefer. “Some people will always want to upgrade their appearance. This is a trend that knows no limit. If it became necessary, they would swap their own DNA if possible. Perhaps it will be, someday”, he mused.

Jones resumed his elbows-down posture at the desk, after brushing aside some papers and seeming to appreciate his reflection in the shiny black surface. I posed another simple question, this time about Root Turagu. Jones looked up with a broad grin across his face.

“One of my faves”, he said. “A man after my own heart. I should like to be the first to sell someone their very own personality.”

“I don't follow”, I told him.

“Snake oil”, he said. T”he one thing your nanoptics and Turagu have in common. Or at least, it seems so, on the surface. Yes, it is so. No need to concern yourself. None at all. People will succumb, as they always do, to the shrewd and the crafty and the brilliant. Turagu is two of those. I myself am all three.”

It seemed that our interview was over, as he stood, and guided me toward the door. I couldn't leave without one more question, however.

“You once sent me something”, I began.

“Yes, yes, a gift”, he replied. “You will be making use of it someday, I promise. I will let you know exactly when. Until that time, however, you'd best be keeping it in a safe place, out of the hands of children, or any other creature for that matter.”

That certainly cleared things up! I left, with the definite impression that I'd been most carefully lied to, and that it wouldn't be the last time.

Eleven

We had some pretty fancy operations going on back in the day, especially in the "war on stuff". We called it the war on stuff because the stuff was always changing. At one time or another, pretty much every kind of substance you could absorb was declared war on, whether it was prescribed by a doctor or not. We were used to constantly revising the list of stuff, which we also called "the goods". If somebody had the goods, that was too bad for them!

Law enforcement went to extremes when it came to the stuff. We had machines, we had tests, we had animals, you name it, we had it. One of the geniuses in that last department was a woman named Kiki Photescu. She'd come from Romania where she had a history of amazingly bad luck. She was originally a circus freak, able to twist herself like a pretzel. They said she could dislocate every single bone in her body at the same time, and pop them all right back into place on cue. Somewhere along the line she picked up some animal training, beginning with cats, if I remember right. She would have these cats distribute themselves randomly in the audience, then they'd all leap out and started yowling at the same time, scaring the crap out of everybody in the building. Some people got scratched, and Kiki got canned.

Now on her own, she moved on to birds - mourning doves, another unfortunate choice, because these birds were able to sniff out death. She'd let them go and off they'd fly through the city, coming to roost within a few feet of where a murder was about to be committed. The cops took to following the birds, and that actually saved a few lives, I think, but then the birds got specialized, and started to forecast "official" killings. The secret police were not too thrilled. Kiki had to choose between emigration or else.

She ended up here in the great southwest where she worked for awhile on a rescue ranch, the kind of place where all the zoo animals get shipped off to once they're no longer useful. They also had some mountain lions relocated from La Honda, California, and some other exotic creatures too wily for mankind. This place was also used for some experimental purposes, and Ms. Photescu was welcomed into that little fraternity there, and got involved in the war on stuff.

We always had drug-sniffing dogs. Everybody knows that dogs are good for pretty much anything. They're smart, they train up well, stay under control, and people like them. Other creatures get tried out from time to time, but usually you ended up with dogs. Kiki was never a dog person. Cats were pretty much useless - she knew that - and she'd become a bit superstitious about birds after her dove adventure. She moved right on to insects. No one's ever been sure how she did it, but she ended up breeding and developing a number of species of curiously adaptive insects. I remember reading about some of them; the roaches that could track down methamphetamine and swarm the labs by the millions, the bees that could sniff out corn syrup, and the ants that marched directly to patchouli oil fields.

What got her into trouble this time - and not just her - were the butterflies. In some ways they were her crowning achievement, those huge yellow and black monarchs she called Fonticiads. Crazy as it sounds, these overgrown caterpillars had a special sense for prides of unstable dibaryons. Kiki Photescu had somehow anticipated the coming stuff list, and there she was, all ready with the tools when subatomics made it. The feds paid a hefty price for her services; after all, they had generated this new panic and needed something showy to highlight their efforts against it, and these masses of gigantic Fonticiads were just the thing - photogenic, larger than life, and unerringly accurate.

The day she brought them here to Spring Hill Lake is the day that everything changed. She kept them in special baskets, a whole pickup load of them; must have been a hundred thousand or more all packed together in the back of that old black Chevy truck. Federal agents had their suspicions, but mostly they just moved from town to town, putting on a show. They'd plant some dibaryons in a building somewhere, let the butterflies loose and sure enough, they'd show up right on time for the six o'clock news. Nobody ever said what the problem was with those particles - research even showed them to be harmless, even hypothetical - but that was not the issue. Getting the public on board was key. There was always some new fright cropping up that needed calming and soothing. The feds liked to get some local involvement too, so there I was, part of their bug and pony show.

This time there apparently weren't enough of the decoy particles to attract the interest of the insects. Nope. They flew straight off in a different direction, headed right down to the waterfront where they surrounded an old abandoned storage warehouse by the railroad yards. Nobody could have guessed that Arab "Cricket" Jones had a thing about butterflies. A pet peeve, if you will; that old saying about a butterfly flapping its wings in China and causing a hurricane in the Atlantic. Well, those butterflies were flapping their wings all right, but not in China. They were flapping them right where Jones and his crew were busy packing up crates of very illegal and very unstable subatomics. It was showtime.

Twelve

Caught up in the siege were a couple of legendary thugs - Krispy Talbot and Jalapeno Perez. These two were better known for their incendiary work, but it seemed they'd graduated to a more subtle explosive level. The whole scene was straight out of a movie. First the feds dragged out the crackly loudspeakers, demanding immediate and unconditional surrender. The helicopter waited until the news cameras showed up, perhaps in a cost-cutting maneuver. They brought out the spotlights even though it was still broad daylight and everyone knew exactly where the fugitives were. Hell, they weren't even running away. Even though you expected to hear something like "you'll never get alive, coppers", in fact the opposite occurred. Jones and the other two walked out the front door as calm as you please with their hands already over their heads.

They were quickly surrounded by butterflies, and I thought I could sense the disgust on Jones' face as he swatted the critters away. Talbot and Perez, both giants in stature compared to Jones, grinned sheepishly as if embarrassed at being so easily apprehended. The federal agents moved in, cuffed the men and led them toward the waiting black vans. As he passed by, Jones gave me a wink and a nod and whispered,

“Not yet, Inspector. Not quite yet.”

I knew what he meant, but I pretended I didn't when grilled by the authorities. I told them I thought he just meant it wasn't the end, that he'd be back, and indeed he was, in remarkably short order. I learned through connections it was Hobbs, Dennis Hobbs who posted their bond, and not a meager amount at that. I'd already guessed there was some connection there and now I was more certain than ever. But I adopted what they used to call a 'wait and see attitude'. After all, the war on stuff wasn't really my beat anymore. I was only part of the show. I had other matters to attend to.

My immediate concern was a fellow by the name of Kram Fletcher. I had been tailing him for a few weeks, convinced he was the same person I formerly knew as Filcher Peron. Peron had slipped through my fingers many years before in as crazy a case as I'd ever come across. He'd been operating in the area of involuntary conversions, taking ordinary people who belonged to one church or another, and sliding them into a different one altogether. He was a slick operator who had no loyalty but would work for whichever evangelical was hot and willing to pay. In those days, ratings were king, and ratings were determined by numbers, kind of like the popularity of television shows or opening weekends for movies. Most of the churches around the state had signed up with the RTN, the agency responsible for rating and ranking religions.

What Peron was up to wasn't strictly illegal but it sure wasn't kosher either. He used chemical inducements along with straight up cash. It was also rumored he was able to transmit convertability through immediate semen injection. He called it a "transfer of energy" but it was clearly more than that. Not a few susceptible women found themselves inexplicably attending a temple not of their typical persuasion. Many were so astonished by their own actions they resorted to desperate measures, even to the extent of praying and paying for candles to be lit, activities which hadn't been seen in ages. Peron had vanished along with a tidy sum of money for which he had allegedly not yet fulfilled his obligations.

Now there was Kram Fletcher. The moment I saw his picture on the screen I just knew he was Filcher Peron, and yet it was going to be damned hard to prove. Fletcher had a full and complete personal history, along with witnesses, many of whom had known him his entire life, all forty seven years of it, including his parents, his siblings, his friends, wife and children. Filcher Peron, on the other hand, had just as full a life (up to the point of his disappearance) with a