Free Dr. Identity by D. Harlan Wilson Page B

scikungfi swordfighting in the Schizoverse. I could handle a gun, too. Shortly after I was born, my mother-thing developed an addiction to firearms, a condition provoked by one of her boyfriends. He was a door-to-door plasma gun salesman. She took me to a shooting gallery before I was old enough to speak, and as far back as my memory carried me, our cubapt looked more like an arsenal than a place to live. I hadn’t so much as picked up a gun since my mother-thing died eight years ago. Even if I had, I wouldn’t be able to fend off the collective wrath of whatever mindless contraptions were sicced on me. Not with any type of weaponry. Not even with Dr. Identity, who had proved itself to be an effective (albeit psychotic) war machine. In other words, I fully expected to die within the next few minutes. Who was I kidding? I was as adept with a sword and a gun as I was negotiating the feelings and complaints of ornery student-things. I wondered how Skyler Buhbye, the protagonist of Technofetahshit Salad , a neurorealistic novel I taught last semester, would have felt in my shoes. I wondered how I felt for that matter: at that particular moment I couldn’t determine whether I was frightened beyond recognition, hopelessly apathetic, or helplessly euphoric.
    A line from a Hardy Boys novel came to me: The boys leapt into the red convertible like handfuls of loose change …
    I walked down the aisle and removed a plague sword from the shelf. It was light, thin, the color of TV static. Impossibly sharp. I could almost feel it slicing through my gaze as I looked it over.
    I thrust the sword into my pocket. A plume of cold sparks tickled the skin of my hand.
    I collected more weapons, trying to catch Dr. Identity. I loaded up on guns, ammunition, swords, entropics. I was especially attracted to coagulators. In many of the science fiction texts I taught, coagulators were fearsome biological weapons. They inflicted damage to living body tissue, rearranging and scrambling one’s musculature, nervous system, and internal organs in hideous ways.
    The pockets were extremely user-friendly. No sense of weight at all in my britches. The more I filled them up, in fact, the lighter they seemed to become. I started to feel like I might float away.
    I didn’t know how much time passed before it began. As little as fifteen seconds. As much as two minutes. Probably closer to fifteen seconds—any longer and a BEM would at least have us in its sights.
    One moment I was grabbing speculative weapons. The next I was the centerpiece in a montage of gore and ultraviolence.
    I blacked out…
    Dr. Identity told me about the skirmish later. We were sitting in a bratwurst bar, sipping cognac and eating pâté. “What do you remember?” it asked.
    “Nothing. Nothing.”
    “Nothing twice over. Hmm. Well. We looked good. Our disguises were state-of-the-art. But that didn’t stop the Babettas. Or the Bug-Eyed Monsters.”
    Not coincidentally, they looked exactly like aliens who belonged to the universe of pulp science fiction. Each BEM had been patterned after a creature illustrated on the cover of an early issue of Amazing Stories , a twentieth century pulp science fiction magazine whose founder and editor, Hugo Gernsback, had in recent years been retrospectively held accountable for the terminal depthlessness of the film industry. The bulk of the BEM’s body, of course, consisted of two gigantic, greasy eyes. Its other prominent features included shark’s teeth, long crablike pincers, and a scorpion’s tail fully loaded with venDom, a substance that, once injected, literally turned victims into commodities, rearranging their molecular structure so that they metabolically devolved into the product they had purchased most frequently at Littleoldladyville. Hilda Grumpstead was an avid reader of Amazing Stories as a little girl, even though the magazine had long been out of print, and this particular BEM terrified her. Hence she recruited it as her