Real Men Don't Bark at Fire Hydrants Part 1

REAL MEN DON'T BARK AT FIRE HYDRANTS.

Tom Easton.

1. UFO Slime Devours Israel!

Mickey Gorgonzola sighed into the phone. "It's just a bit of fungus, Larry.

That's all it is."

While the man on the other end of the line insisted he was wrong, Mickey rocked his head in his hand and thought, If only I were! He had wished that UFOs were real ever since he first heard the term at the age of eight.

"What does Israel have to do with it, Larry?" Mickey asked emphatically even though he knew better. "It's the Holy Land? Someone faxes t.i.ts'n'Tats to say he saw a UFO land, and he went out in the desert and found a dent in the sand and a clot of mud with bits of twiggy stuff, and you believe him?" Mickey wished he could believe.

Now it was Larry's turn to shout. When he obliged, Mickey winced and held the phone away from his ear.

"What do you mean, I don't have to be insulting? So he sent that photo."

And Larry had faxed it to Mickey. "Have you forgotten what a scale bar means?

Right. That twiggy bit is a tenth of a millimeter long, it can't be anything except a piece of soil fungus, and they used a scanning electron microscope to take that photo."

He didn't have to wince this time, but it was still very clear that he wasn't getting through. "Yeah, it's first cousin to a toadstool." The closest he could hope t.i.ttles and Tattles would come to the truth would be a headline screaming: "THE TOADSTOOL FROM BEYOND THE SKY!!!"

He used a pencil to draw a Kilroy on the edge of the photo while Larry confirmed his cynicism. When the other paused for breath, he said as gently as he could, "It isn't real, Larry. If it was... Remember when NASA was getting ready to put landers on the Moon? The Vikings on Mars? ... So I'll fill you in.

They put a lot of effort into sterilizing everything. They didn't want to take a chance that something from Earth would get loose and multiply and become the slime that ate a world. So maybe..."

And there was another headline: "UFO SLIME DEVOURS ISRAEL!!"

Larry would love that, wouldn't he?

"Yeah," he said. "Glad I could help. I'll bill you."

He hung up. He sighed again, more deeply and more loudly now that he needn't worry about offending... No. He shook his head. Larry Castle was a tabloid reporter. The only time he ever took offense was when a source clammed up on him. His calloused hide made a rhino's b.u.t.t look like a maiden's cheek.

Sometimes Mickey wished he could penetrate that hide a little more deeply.

Sometimes he wished he had never heard of UFOs.

2. Real Men Don't Bark at Fire Hydrants

Mickey leaned over his laser printer to crank the filthy cas.e.m.e.nt window open. The September air was all he needed to clear the mustiness from both the office and his head. Traffic noise engulfed him. Twenty feet below was the steady flow of the city's populace on foot and bicycle, in cars and trucks and city buses.

He was turning back toward the desk when something caught his eye.

A businessman, an executive by the look of his silvery sideburns, his unwrinkled suit, and his glossy attache case, was striding purposefully toward the fire hydrant across the street. He was wearing a ferocious scowl.

The executive stopped before the hydrant, opened his attache case on the sidewalk, took off his suitcoat, and laid it in the case. Then he laid a yellow legal pad on the sidewalk, knelt on it, leaned forward, and caught his weight on his hands. He extended his neck toward the hydrant. Mickey thought he could hear...

The phone rang. He swore, but he managed to pick it up before it could ring a second time.

"Angela!" Angela Colby was his agent. He sat down once more. "Do you mind if I call you back later? There's a man on the street outside, growling at a fire hydrant... No, not a b.u.m. Quite well dressed. Might even be one of your colleagues..." His chuckle lasted only long enough for him to realize he was the only one laughing.

While she talked, he tipped his chair and leaned toward the window. The executive was still on his knees, but now he was jerking back and forth, his mouth was abruptly opening and closing. The sound... "My G.o.d," he said. "He's barking! What? At the fire hydrant. That man on the sidewalk. He's..."

He sighed much as he had for Larry Castle. "Yes, Angela... It's coming," he said as soon as his agent paused for breath. "I know it's just a proposal. I know I've been working on it for two weeks already."

He winced and tilted the phone away from his ear. "I want the advance as much as you do. But you know you can't rush these things, Angela... No, that barking idiot showed up for the first time just before your call."

The s.h.i.+rt-sleeved executive was still on his knees, still barking at the fire hydrant. What was wrong with him? He couldn't possibly be normal, could he?

Normal people didn't do such things.

Although they did sometimes act quite strange.

He glanced at his computer. What he had accomplished in two weeks didn't quite fill the screen. "You'll have it by next week. Cross my heart. That's a promise."

As soon as he hung up the phone, he put his head in both hands. Next week, he thought. He had less than a page. He needed at least ten.

Once that had been a day's work. But then he had realized that what he was writing were nothing more than travel books for armchair explorers who preferred a vicarious quest for bug-eyed aliens to one for the last of the Tasaday.

This one would be just like all the rest, and the very thought of writing it bored him to madness.

Though the quest itself had been as fascinating as ever.

It had begun last spring, when Larry Castle called to tell him that a Russian stringer had reported that a hunter had shot down a 50-pound b.u.t.ter~fly with a six-foot wingspread. Mickey had been skeptical--Mother Nature had laws against bugs that big, after all. But when Larry asked him to investigate the story for t.i.ts'n'Tats, he had accepted the a.s.signment. He had then spent the month of July in the Komi Republic northeast of Moscow. Unfortunately, there had been no sign of the stringer, the hunter, or trophy-sized b.u.t.terflies, dead or alive.

What he had found instead was the museum in Syktyvkar, the Komi capital, and its permanent exhibit of paintings by UFO contactees. Several of the paintings supposedly showed the giant b.u.t.terflies, though they looked more like a three-year-old's fingerpaint renditions of flowers without stems.

And two weeks before, when he had told Angela Colby the story and shown her his photos, she had decided it would be his next book.

He stood up and leaned over his laser printer once more. The executive was still there, still on his knees, still barking at the fire hydrant.

Mickey shook his head. How much longer could he keep it up?

As Mickey watched, someone finally slowed as if to join the few spectators.

He was a tall man, straight-backed and dignified despite the ragged overcoat hanging from his shoulders and the battered top hat squas.h.i.+ng his hair into a fringe of gray curls. His wide mouth was stretched into a grin that struck Mickey as just as goofy as the executive's barks.

When he reached the executive, the newcomer stopped, reached into a pocket of his overcoat, and began to withdraw a rope hand over hand.

The rope coiled on the pavement between the newcomer and the still-barking executive. It seemed endless, and within moments several more pa.s.sersby stopped to watch, their mouths half open like those of children watching a stage magician.

When twenty feet of rope were on the ground, the newcomer fas.h.i.+oned a loop, stood, and dropped the noose over the barking executive's head as if he were leas.h.i.+ng a dog.

Two of the onlookers laughed out loud.

The executive immediately leaped to his feet. He barked once more, a shrill yip, threw off the noose, and glared at the other man. Then he put on his suitcoat, tossed his legal pad into his attache case, picked up the case, and stalked off.

The ragged newcomer shrugged elaborately, yapped once at the executive's back, and winked at the onlookers. Then he undid the noose, returned the rope to his pocket, and followed the executive down the street and around the corner.

"You wouldn't believe it, Kilroy!" The shepherd-beagle mix gaped his jaws and rolled over on the rug so Mickey could scratch his belly.