Ninety Percent Of Everything Part 4

"A very thoughtful man." Nguyen lowered his face dangerously close to the Vaporub saucer and breathed deeply. "A saint, actually."

"Who?"

"Our good friend Wetherall." Nguyen took a little brown bottle from his s.h.i.+rt and shook it. A handful of pills rattled inside. "Sent us a nosegay." He gave me a dreamy, very un-Nguyen-like leer.

I managed not to tell him just how Saint Wetherall was spending his time while O'Hara and I camped out in Laputa.

The pills Nguyen had dubbed nosegays were prototypes of an anti-stink drug that Wetherall had commissioned. Since there wasn't any cost-effective way to purify the air of s.h.i.+tdog stench, the olfactory psychophysiologists at Jolly Freeze R&D had instead attacked the brain receptors involved in processing smells. The pills transformed human perception of the big stink. The smell was just as strong as ever, but nosegay users experienced it as sweet and appetizing.

Of course, there were psychotropic side effects: the flood of smell-stimuli had a mild hallucinogenic effect. Certainly Nguyen was acting odd. It was several hours before I was able to talk him out of smearing himself with his own . . . but never mind. Although Wetherall's avatar a.s.sured us that a simple dosage adjustment was all that was necessary, I was wary.

Nguyen was not; he couldn't wait for the new improved batch. It wasn't until I saw that he was able to control his stink tropisms that I was finally convinced to try the drug.

I was impressed. Nosegays transformed the fetid air of the press encampment. And the intoxication induced by the lower dose was mild and actually quite pleasant. It made me feel at once silly and happy-like when I jumped on a bed.

I missed jumping on the bed. It just wasn't something you did in a lifthouse.

Not only did Wetherall's money make unusual things happen, it made them happen fast. Just last week I'd been worrying about my course load. Now I was writing the handbook for the entirely new art of s.h.i.+tdog management. Meanwhile, though I hardly had time to stop and marvel at it, plasticians were already a.s.sembling Wetherall's house. While his avatars oversaw the project, the man himself stayed away. I hadn't seen the real Wetherall since he left my hotel room at the Zones. I imagined him holed up in some Ramada Inn with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Maybe I'm a naive academic, but I was surprised at the ferocity of people's interest in what we were doing at Stateline. Sure, Wetherall's business, O'Hara's Laputa and the mystery of the s.h.i.+tdogs were each-to varying degrees-newsworthy in and of themselves, but the publicity surrounding the conjunction of all three was exponential. We always made the news; often as not we were the lead story. And not just in Vegas or LA, but in Berlin and Djakarta!

Profit Week reported that s.h.i.+tdog castings would provide heretofore unimagined materials engineering applications, and that Wetherall would soon roll out a line of casting-based superadhesives.

Hemisphere Confidential Report ran a story, complete with faked blueprints, which proved that Wetherall was building the lifthouse as a kind of degenerate love nest, where smelly and unspeakable s.e.xual acts were to take place.

No, said Channel Lore, the lifthouse was designed to be the most secure site on the planet; mercenary s.h.i.+tdogs would act as Wetherall's personal bodyguards against kidnappers and industrial saboteurs.

On NewsMelt, Blaine Thorp claimed he'd helped decipher the s.h.i.+tdog's language and explained that Wetherall was moving into the lifthouse to conduct secret negotiations for the establishment of a s.p.a.ce-based utopia.

Eye offered this exclusive: Wetherall had devised a way to remove the jewels from the piles intact and had already contracted with Cartier's to turn them into the world's biggest necklace. Some insiders speculated he'd offer it as an engagement present to Dawn Zoftiggle. But "inside" insiders revealed that Wetherall had fallen head over heels in love with a woman he'd met while on location near the Stateline site. This mystery woman, it was said by those who really knew, would someday wear the alien jewels.

I credited none of this, of course, except the part about the mystery woman, whom I took to be the bimbo at the motel. But the volume and audacity of the false reports boded ill for his hopes of privacy, once the lifthouse was completed. Meanwhile, Wetherall's avatars gave cheery and innocuous interviews to whomever would listen. Only no one seemed to believe anything they said. Instead, commentators read sinister meaning into their PR plat.i.tudes.

Whenever he wasn't working on the project, Nguyen would personally lead reporters through Laputa. He was very disciplined in his approach: he would discuss himself, the lifthouse, the remoteness of the site, the problems of building around the s.h.i.+tdogs and then more about himself. He deflected questions he didn't want to answer with self-deprecating humor, and was gentlemanly about keeping me out of the spotlight, making sure I knew when tours were scheduled so I could retreat to my room. When questions about the s.h.i.+tdogs came up, he transformed me into an anonymous committee. It was always "My experts tell me that . . ." or "I've consulted my advisors on this . . ."

I was grateful for Nguyen's discretion, because Wetherall had yet to deliver my avatar.

Murk Janglish tried to explain it during one of his visits to Laputa. "Never seen anything like it, actually," he said. "At first I thought it was your fault. Maybe you sabotaged the inventory or something, but the techs say no. There must have been some noise in the signal when your personality was scanned."

I was secretly gratified. I liked it that they were having troubles cramming me into their d.a.m.ned program.

"I'll be patient," I said. "But I'm not going public. Nguyen will just have to keep s.h.i.+elding me."

"s.h.i.+elding you?" said Janglish icily. "More like throwing himself at every camera he sees."

Nguyen smiled.

"You're getting so much publicity out of this, O'Hara, you ought to be paying us."

Nguyen laughed out loud. "Now what would my good friend Wetherall do with more money?" he said, refilling Janglish's champagne gla.s.s. "He has got far too much as it is."

Two days later Nguyen and I stood out on the salt flat, our noses filled with the fragrance of s.h.i.+tdogs digesting. It would have been delightful except for the late afternoon sun beating on us. We were waiting for the driver of the prototype mobile base that the Jolly Freeze engineers had thrown together. I had ordered a test run to see how the dogs would react. At the moment they lay pulsing, looking as oblivious and lazy as ever.

They weren't, of course. Things were changing.

I'd spent the last two days confirming my discovery, and calculating the rate of change. I was trying to decide how much to reveal-because here I was, Wetherall's magnificently paid s.h.i.+tdog expert, the rational scientist who had replaced mooncalf Thorp-and I didn't know what it meant. But then I wasn't sure what any s.h.i.+tdog behavior meant.

"The s.h.i.+tdogs are eating and excreting faster," I blurted out. "The third pile here is acc.u.mulating at almost twice the rate of the first two."

"Hmmm," said Nguyen. "Could it be that they're adjusting to earth conditions-getting better at whatever it is they do?"

"They're showing no comparable changes at any of the other sites," I said. "I checked the international database earlier today."

"Maybe it's a response to our activities," said Nguyen.

"That's my guess, but don't quote me."

"Which activities? Our construction is taking place far from them. We're observing them, but they've been observed before."

I shrugged. "I don't know how this will affect the project," I said, "but it does represent an advance in s.h.i.+tdog studies. For the first time we can be certain that the piles are a product rather than a byproduct. If they were only concerned with getting enough to 'eat,' their rate wouldn't change. The fact that they've speeded up confirms that it's production."

"They feel acknowledged, perhaps," said Nguyen playfully. "They wish to encourage art appreciation. Fair enough. More jewels to look at. But if this news gets out, it's going to attract even more attention."

"It'll get out eventually," I said. "Exobiologists will take notice; s.h.i.+tdog behavior doesn't change often. And it isn't happening at the other sites."

"Hmmm," said Nguyen. "Maybe we should build lifthouses at all the other sites too. Then Stateline wouldn't be so distinctive."

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell this to Wetherall until I've figured out the implications."

I didn't tell Nguyen my suspicion that the configuration of the piles and jewels might have some semiotic significance. Aunt Lindsay had done her dissertation on how the shape of African termite mounds was evolutionarily designed to communicate to other termite colonies. If, as it appeared, s.h.i.+tdog behavior could respond to that of humans, then that suggested the possibility of a feedback loop-s.h.i.+tdog behavior influencing humans, who then influenced the s.h.i.+tdogs. A kind of subliminal, semiotic communication. But this notion was so Thorplike I did not want to have to admit to it until I understood more.

Nguyen was gazing up at pile C. He turned and winked, as if letting me in on a joke. Only I didn't get it. Not all signs are so easily read.

The base rolled up and stopped, clicking in the heat. The driver was dressed entirely in denim, his red-bearded face shadowed by a hat the size of a manhole cover. He motioned for us to enter; the cab had been fitted with first cla.s.s airline seats. Nguyen climbed in first. When the driver reached out to help me up, his grip, cool as a Billy Bar, made me do a double take. It was Wetherall.

"Great to see you again, Liz." His big, oblivious smile flashed through the fake whiskers. There was no apology for humiliating me outside the Jolly Freeze van.

Nguyen took it in stride. "So I take it you've gotten yourself instructed on how to drive this from the crew."

"I arranged a private tutorial."

"You might at least have let us know in advance," I said.

"Then Janglish would've had to be here to make sure I didn't have any unscheduled fun."

"Oh, Murk's not that bad," Nguyen murmured, "for a stone-hearted workaholic. You took a nosegay? We'll be parking right next to Stink Central."

Wetherall slipped into the driver's seat in front of us and strapped himself in. "About twenty minutes ago. When I was a kid I used to grow orchids. I had this one cattleya, Bealls Red. It was dark as blood and had a fragrance big enough to fill a room." He took a deep breath. "That's what I'm getting now." He leaned back in his seat, eyes glazing momentarily at the memory. "The nosegays are an extraordinary accomplishment. A shame we have to hold them off the market."

"You're not going to sell them?" I said. "But think of the applications."

Wetherall punched the code that started up the turbine. "Liz, the big stink is my fence; it's how I'm going to keep the world out. Why would I pull that fence down after I've gone to all this trouble to acquire it?"

The arrogance of the man made me momentarily dizzy. Or maybe it was the swelter in the cab. I could feel sweat tickle down my side.

"Doesn't that beard make you warm, Wetherall?" I said. "I thought you liked life on ice."

"It is a little close in here." Nguyen swabbed his forehead with a b.u.t.ter-colored handkerchief.

"Oh, my clothes are air-conditioned," he said. "I couldn't think straight without them."

Wetherall, Nguyen and I giggled like kids as the s.h.i.+tdog chased us. Of course, Wetherall's nosegays had something to do with our delight. We sat strapped into seats underneath a nuglas bubble. The base roared across the salt flat on its six treads, kicking up scuffs of salt and sand and sc.r.a.ps of the low, dry junipers that grew here and there in the basin. We were headed away from the Stateline A pile; the s.h.i.+tdog galloped in its ungainly way behind us like a nightmare rocking horse. As we drove, we fired a simulation tracking beam up at a helicopter that was standing-in for Wetherall's future house. So far, so good-no matter our position or speed, the beam remained unbroken.

Our initial approach hadn't aroused their interest. They ignored us as we zoomed around the pile, and they ignored us when we idled a few yards away from them. They hadn't even sniffed at the mobile base, let alone nibbled. That was when Wetherall brought out a smart la.s.so. As we pulled alongside one he opened the window, leaned out, swung four big loops and let it fly. The running noose slithered over the s.h.i.+tdog's head. Wetherall tied the end to the armrest on the door and then stomped on the brakes.

We lost the door but had finally provoked one into chasing us.

It smelled like heaven's own bakery. "Chocolate-covered raspberries!" shouted Wetherall. "Bittersweet chocolate, I mean."

"Chai tea, with plenty of honey and b.u.t.termilk," corrected Nguyen. "And perhaps a crumb of pistachio baklava, too."

Myself, I kept catching smell-glimpses of Billybars and Charley Chuncolate Cones. Why should activating my odor-pleasure centers recall Jolly Freeze products? Those were Wetherall's positive smell a.s.sociations, not mine.

"Liz." Wetherall touched my wrist. "Do you think it's angry at us?"

I turned to the beast that galumphed patiently after us. "Who can say? We've hardly worked out their vocabulary of expressions-short of barking at the Chileans that one time, they don't have any. It certainly seems more sporting than angry, though. Wouldn't you agree?"

"Yes," said Wetherall. "Though I could be projecting. That is to say, sporting is the perfect word for how I feel. Our mobile base is going to work just fine, isn't it?"

"All the data is not yet in," Nguyen said. He glanced at me significantly. I guessed he was waiting for me to mention the changes I'd observed. "Remember, the real base is going to be towing a house six times the ma.s.s of Laputa. That will reduce maneuverability significantly."

"Nevertheless-"

As they debated, it occurred to me that we'd stumbled onto something that would make a tourist attraction if the word got out-s.h.i.+tdog-wrangling. The nosegays added a certain essential elan to it all. I was sure a lot of people would pay handsomely for the fun we were having. The tickets we could sell would pay for a dozen Laputas. But with Wetherall's deep pockets and craving for privacy, I doubted whether anyone but him would ever sample this novelty.

That night, Wetherall stayed with us for the first time. Nguyen had Laputa towed to where Wetherall's lifthouse was under construction. Since this site was almost three kilometers closer to the piles, we had to double our dosage of nosegays to cope with the big stink.

Over dinner, Wetherall was talkative and charming, Nguyen was taciturn. Finally he spoke. "Perhaps it's time to name your house, Wetherall?"

"How about Queen Jolly Freeze?" I said. "Pretend it's just a floating ice cream truck. That way no one will guess it's where you live." This time I wanted Nguyen to turn and wink, laugh with me at this ludicrous man. But he ignored me.

Wetherall was busy fantasizing about his house. "When we run the first test, I want to be on board," he said. "Let's take it over pile A, so I can try the viewing room. If we need to make any adjustments, I want them done as soon as possible."

"You sure you can steel yourself to look down from such a height?" said Nguyen.

"At least there, I'll have something worth looking at."

"All right," sighed Nguyen. "I suppose it's time I see these jewels for myself."

Wetherall looked shocked. "You haven't seen them yet!"

"I've been busy," Nguyen said. "Other matters required my attention."

"My G.o.d, Nguyen," said Wetherall. "The jewels are what this is all about."

"For you." He sighed. "Oh, I've looked at pixes. They're admirable.

"You may not be the sort of person they are designed for," I said.

Wetherall picked up on that instantly. "What do you mean?"

I did not want to spill the beans on my theory so soon. "Nothing. Just that the jewels seem to fascinate some people more than others."

"Like Wetherall and you?" Nguyen said.

"And Thorp," Wetherall added.

I laughed. "Let's leave him out of this."

"Why did you call them s.h.i.+tdogs, Liz?" Nguyen asked. "Aren't you embara.s.sed to be studying something called a s.h.i.+tdog?"

"The Marines named them. n.o.body asked me, " I said. It was a sore subject, so I changed it. "What about that name for your house?"

"If that's what you want," said Wetherall. "Queen Jolly Freeze will do nicely."

As dinner went on, Nguyen became increasingly quiet. He hadn't been eating well of late, he told us, because everything tasted like boiled potatoes.

"It's true," said Wetherall, digging a spoon into a melting scoop of Mintastic. "Even my private blend of Jolly Freeze has clearly suffered flavor degradation. But they tell me it's temporary. Don't worry, your taste buds will bloom again, Nguyen. Besides, it's a small price to pay for the jewels-and all this emptiness."

"As rewarding as this project has been," said Nguyen wearily, "I begin to look forward to its completion."

At that, I felt a vague dismay. Without noticing, I'd gotten used to Nguyen O'Hara's company, his dark, ironic presence.

He stood abruptly, muttered something about running some simulations and was gone before either of us could protest. Wetherall and I looked at each other across the table, then I glanced quickly down at my plate. Being stranded for the evening with the Emperor of Ice Cream was not what I'd had in mind.