The Israel Bond Omnibus (31 page)

“Now I know you’re mad, Dr. Nu. I am willing to admit that ‘bugging the bugs’ is a unique method of obtaining information. One would never suspect the wayward roach, the frolicking June bug to be spies. But—”

A slight nuance of contempt crossed that composed face. “Mr. Bond, you are tough, resourceful, and clever... up to a point. Yet your mind fails to comprehend the spheres in which my work leads me. I shall give you a demonstration that will save me thousands of words.”

He flicked a red switch. A light glowed; Bond’s ears suddenly felt a sharp pain, heard an unearthly electronic atonality. “You will find the pain subsiding in a few seconds as your ears adjust to the frequency.” He spoke into a microphone. “Sectional commanders will report to the conference table on the double!”

I am as
tzoodrayt
as this yellow Eiffel Tower of a nut, Bond told himself. I must be. I see a parade creeping over the floor, a line of insects! Crawling, hopping, flying low. I hear humming, chirping, buzzing... they’re making their way up the legs of the conference table, aligning themselves in set positions... the doctor has pushed another switch... miniature microphones are popping out in front of each bug... and name plates... “JAPANESE BEETLE,” “CICADA,” “LOCUST,” “MOSQUITO,” “TSETSE FLY”....
Gottenu!
This looks like an insect—

“Summit conference, Mr. Bond,” said Dr. Nu with a pleased smile. “That is what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Before we proceed with the agenda, I’ll just”—he turned off the red switch—“cut the frequency so they cannot hear us. In précis, here is the theory that led me to this marvelous discovery and IPECAC.

“As you know, I am a scientist, the world’s greatest, you now must concede. As a friendless unwanted child I spent countless lonely hours. Time hung heavy upon my hands, but even at that stage I possessed a boundless intellectual curiosity about my environment. I spent many hours stretched out upon the carpet of the great forest observing nature’s littlest creatures scuttle about, make love, kill, die. And I began to notice that all of them would pause momentarily in the presence of their own or other species to move their feelers, antennae, palpi or rub their legs together. This, I deduced, was some kind of language based on sound. Sound that could be heard, as in the case of the crickets; sound that couldn’t, i.e., worms, beetles, aphids, termites, etc. Since various insects made certain moves, displayed certain attitudes in the presence of others, I further reasoned there must be an insect Swahili, a lingua franca, known to all such creatures. It was an interesting theory but one I put aside in some dark recess of my mind for future reference. Three years ago I recalled it; launched a series of experiments to validate it. The key word, let me repeat, was ‘sound.’ Yet, as I stated previously, not all of their sounds were audible, at least to my normal aural range. So I hit upon the felicitous idea of using the most sensitive sound reproduction equipment ever assembled, which could not only discern sound thousands of decibels below human hearing but boost it to our level. You will be surprised to learn that the only equipment capable of this most delicate pickup and boost is to be found solely in the chassis of a 1949 Muntz television set. Now that I could distinguish the sound I began to observe, as I had in my childhood, the different moves of insects, correlating sound and action, until I discovered the fact that though each insect had its own distinct sound it also had a universal one. Thus I began to construct their common language after many months of observing, note-taking, cataloguing. And IPECAC was born. It can do many things, Mr. Bond, because its memory banks have been fed enormous quantities of information about the major orders of insecta. IPECAC hears, reproduces sound to my level, feeds sound to its banks, translates into all major human tongues—I have pressed the English one for your benefit and mine—and reverses the procedure when I wish to communicate with them. But I will show you.” Switch back on, he cried: “Hello, little friends!”

Israel Bond thought, I’m mad for sure. For in response to the doctor’s salutation he saw the waving and scraping of insect appendages commence in unison; heard them—sing!

“Hippity hop, hutsut, rainbow roo,

Siboneyeh skippity, we love you.

What ’ere you ask we’ll gladly do,

’Cause we sure love you, Dr. Nu.”

Unbelievable! Scores of insects chanting a childish doggerel to a beloved Romper Room teacher! What’s next? he wondered. Will they pull out tiny copies of
My Weekly Reader
and find out if Dick and Jane are pummeling Baby? And that Spot has rabies? And has been making it with Robin Hound?

“Thank you, my creatures,” said the doctor benignly. “And now we shall open our seminar with a discussion of how you can help your dear doctor and his leader take over this earth. First, may we hear the scout reports?”

The lighted name plate “HONEYBEE” went on. “I have been buzzing around the convent, Dr. Nu. The Israelis have been given shelter by the monks. They are without weapons, ripe for attack.”

“Excellent!” cried Dr. Nu. “I shall contact the main Chinese, Fidelista and Russian Forces in EET and order them to infiltrate tomorrow night across The Band. They will launch a three-pronged attack and wipe out the remaining Israelis and the convent as well. These sanctimonious swine have been a stumbling block and a divisive influence with their insidious good deeds.”

HONEYBEE flashed again. “Doctor, I have a distressing personal problem. These continual long-range spy flights have decimated me. My wings are worn to a frazzle, my strength gone.”

“Fly over here, little friend,” Dr. Nu said kindly, and HONEYBEE made a waspline toward him. “Here,” he opened his hand and placed a pill in its palm with the other. “Eat this. A vitamin to restore your health.”

“What did you give it?”

“What else, Mr. Bond? Bee-complex.”

“Of course.”

Now there was a beep as name plate “TICK” lit up. “Doc, will you please tell that goddam CANTHARIS to keep his horny legs off me? You think he gives a crap for our conference? To him it’s just an excuse to ball, ball, ball....”

“CANTHARIS, please desist from these unwholesome activities at once!” the doctor ordered.

“Doc,” CANTHARIS pleaded. “I got this Spanish fly built in. Can I help it?” And the voice grew suggestive. “Hey, GRASSHOPPER, that’s a sweet leg you got there. Let me bite it, baby.”

Bond heard a scream from GRASSHOPPER. “Please... no! No!” Dr. Nu’s forefinger poked a button. There was a puff of smoke. The “CANTHARIS” name plate and microphone disappeared. “I regret the disruption,” said the doctor, “but we all will agree that CANTHARIS, due to no fault of his own, had to be eliminated. Such as he have no usefulness in this organization.”

SCORPION cut in. “Doc, that Israeli trussed up over there... ain’t he the one that squashed my poor cousin, Jethro, a while back? Let me give the murdering bastard the back of my tail... a little sting-a-ding-ding-dingaroonie!”

“Leave his fate to me, my little ally from Durango. I shall see to it that your kind is revenged in full.”

“Say, Doc.” LOCUST was speaking now, and Bond could detect a touch of wariness, even hostility. “What’s in all of this for us? All I can see is we’re the patsies... the guys who die like flies, you should pardon the expression, flies, while you get this globe handed to you on a plate.”

“I had anticipated that very natural question from one of you,” said the doctor with the pleasant air of a lecturer about to make a point. “It is true that I shall benefit from your labors, dear insects, but you, too, stand to do the same. For instance, you, LOCUST, you and your brethren, shackled by a ludicrous tradition, only swarm once every seventeen years. Why, pray tell, waste those sixteen in slumber? A triumph for me insures you a free hand—or wing—every year at mankind’s bursting granaries, wheat fields, canebrakes untroubled by meddlesome humans with their killing pesticides. HOUSEFLY, would you not enjoy unfettered flight in any human domicile, knowing that those sticky ribbon deathtraps were gone forever? CARPET BEETLE, think of it... the world’s fattest, juiciest woolen rugs, thousands of warehouses filled with them, and all at your disposal. MOTH, would it not give you the most exhilarating sensation to gorge yourself on Jerry Lewis’ three hundred mohair suits? You see, we have a mutuality of interest here.”

“I cannot agree to this thing.”

Shocked, all eyes, human and insect, focused on the illuminated name plate “JAPANESE BEETLE.”

“Prease to accept humbre aporogy, but cannot be a party to destruction of my beroved Dai Nippon. I go now in peace, yiss, Dr. Nu?”

The answer was a terse, “No.”

JAPANESE BEETLE met the same fate as CANTHARIS. A yell of agony, the sickening odor of singed beetle flesh, and it was over. “That also was necessary,” the doctor sighed. “If there are no further items, we shall conclude with the singing of our stirring anthem, ‘Larva Come Back to Me.’”

As the insects propped themselves up into a humanlike posture of attention and shrilled their song, Bond’s thoughts were off his pain-racked body. That computer! If only I could get to it! The seed of a scheme was germinating in his brain.

Dr. Nu watched his horde slink and fly off.

“Can you deny now, Oy Oy Seven, that you, indeed, have been accorded a rare privilege?”

“No. I suppose I shall pay for it in some equally diabolical manner, eh, Dr. Nu?”

“Yes, Israel Bond. Your moment has come.” And he clapped his hands. “Topjob! Activate the WC!”

A pinpoint of light danced on the screen; then spread into a white intensity that flooded away the black.

“Shucks, Jed Clampett. You don’t mean ter tell me thar’s oil in that thar land?” The speaker on the screen was a scraggly-haired woman in a calico dress. Her question was followed by howls of laughter, from an unseen audience. “What’s so funny about that? Bond wondered. “Yup,” said a rural-type man with a sunburned face. More uncontrollable laughter; another puzzlement to Bond. “Well, I guess we-uns is rich!” chortled the woman, smacking her backside with a good-natured flourish. More audience laughter; one of the women was shrieking at the top of her lungs.

It faded, supplanted by a pert snub-nosed charmer whose moist lips kept repeating: “Dippity-Do.... Dippity-Do.... Dippity-Do.”

From another world he heard Dr. Nu: “One minute.”

Now the face on the screen was that of a jolly, bespectacled little man in a pin-stripe suit and straw hat. “What makes you think you’re worthy of being our Queen of Misery today, Mrs. Ruth Kurtzer of Buzzard’s Bladder, North Dakota, any more than Mrs. Ray Abney, our hunchback from Rufus Jarman, Tennessee, or Mrs. Hilda Shivers, the plucky but hopelessly braindamaged housewife from Cooze Corners, Maine?” “Well, I’ll tell yer, Mr. Nelson... I crawled here on muh arthritic legs all the way from Dakoty, with them cars runnin’ over my poor chilblained hands, jes’ so’s I could tell yuh about my spavined son, Chesley, who is feelin’ po’ly and needs an operation real bad so’s he can harvest the crops in time to make the mortgage payment to hard-hearted Squire Taliaferro.” “What do you think, audience?” cried the little man. “Is she the queen?” Booing and catcalling broke out; a brick thrown on-stage smashed the woman in her old grey head. “Guess not,” shrugged the little man. “Let’s bring on our last contestant, Mrs. Louise Wieczorek of Chauquatauchauqua, Oklahoma, our thalidomide-taking mother who fears that...”

“Two minutes,” said Dr. Nu, inhaling his hookah tube.

An emotion-packed voice. “Yes, this fall you’ll thrill to the dramatic series of a man searching for himself, Shelley Keats, a new face that will haunt your memory forever, in the role of Flapjack Huggins, a Texas medico-scuba diver with amnesia and incurable conjunctivitis, falsely accused of leaving his comrades to die in the Alamo, a Dallas motel, in 1959. Ride, walk, and swim with Flapjack Huggins and his laughable side-kick, Waco, as he seeks for thirty-nine or seventy-eight episodes the man who smeared his name. Thrill to every episode of Branded Forgetful Underwater Intern Who Rides, Walks and Swims for His Life.”