“I made it!” she told her future audience. Then she saw the last of the polar bears, a female it appeared, lying on the stern wall of the bridge looking confused and unhappy. “Oh!” Amelia said to it. “Hi! Hi, bear! Stay right there!”
This inadvertent little nursery rhyme inspired her to make a kind of Peter Pan lifted-by-wires move up into the bridge, pulling hard on the doorjamb to launch herself upward while she also tugged the tranquilizer dart gun out of her belt. She came within a few pounds per square inch of shooting herself in the belly, but did not. When she cleared the door she toed the floor and leaped upward, and the bags helped make it quite a balletic move, almost too much so, as the bags ran into the glass front wall and she soared into the bags and then started to fall back down, back toward the bear, who was rising on her haunches with an investigative or at least troubled expression. So Amelia without the slightest reluctance shot the bear in the shoulder, then again in the chest; then she landed on the back wall right next to it. It was looking at the dart in its chest unhappily. It brushed it off, then growled loudly, so loudly that Amelia instinctively jumped up again and got another surprising helium assist, afterward flailing a bit as she pendulumed around the air of the room right above the bear, who waved at her woozily. Then the bear grew content to lie down and sleep it off, and Amelia avoided plunging through the open door to the hall by way of some deft footwork, after which she landed and sat there on the back wall beside the open door, now like a trapdoor to doom, hyperventilating. “Oh. My. God.”
When the bear seemed to be really out, Amelia asked Frans to right the ship. Then she thought it over and countermanded that request, and approached the drugged bear’s side to see if she could move her to the doorway and let her slide senselessly down the hall to her proper quarters. But she couldn’t move the bear. Not at all. The bear was a big heavy lump, like a sleeping dog that knew where it wanted to sleep and wouldn’t be budged even when unconscious. Even a dog could do that with Amelia, and this bear weighed about seven hundred pounds. “If I had a lever, I could move the bear,” Amelia said aloud. This caused her to remember that there was a come-along in the tool closet, but that was no help now.
“Here, Frans,” she said, looking at the bridge carefully. “Bring yourself around in the air so that the bear will slide toward the bridge door. Do you see what I mean?”
“No.”
Amelia had to think out the directions, then tell Frans which way to tilt. She herself was not much better at it than the autopilot, and it took some experimenting, but eventually she got the airship tilting the right way, and the comatose bear slid toward the doorway, now a kind of trapdoor. When it was close to the edge, Amelia used a broom as a crowbar and levered the bear into the doorway. Prepared for this moment, Amelia ordered Frans to shift more off the vertical at the same moment the bear rolled into the hole, and it seemed like Frans tilted fast enough that when the bear hit the stern end of the hall, it was more sliding than falling. Then it plopped through the doorway down there into the bears’ quarters.
“Now I have to close the door!” Amelia cried, and she jumped through the doorway still holding the bags of helium and lofted down the hallway like a parachutist, kind of, until she thumped down next to the doorway to the bears’ quarters, just narrowly avoiding a drop right through the open door that would have had her joining the bears, not good, but by spread-eagling she did avoid it, and quickly she closed and locked the enclosure door.
“Frans, right the ship!” she said triumphantly, and then killed the cameras and crawled up to the bathroom to pee. “Yay!”
People born and bred to life within earshot and eye glance of a score of neighbors have learned to preserve their own private worlds by uniformly ignoring each other, except on direct invitation.
—John Michael Hayes and Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window
e) Inspector Gen
Inspector Gen walked the skyways to work. Breezy fall day. Autumn in New York, the great song of the city. Wave tank patterns diamonding the canals below, lit from the south by the low morning sun. Her favorite time of year. Have to get out the heavier jacket.
In the station it was the usual scurrying about. The blunt edge of pandemonium. How could there be crime on a day so beautiful? So many different kinds of hunger. Desperate eyes in a blank face, hands manacled, chain around waist. Ah the waste. Hold the line.
She went into her office and sat down behind her desk. She kept the desktop clear, the only way to keep it from being inundated. She picked up the single note on the battered blotter and saw that her chief assistant, Lieutenant Claire Clooney, wanted a meeting with her and Sergeant Olmstead. She was about to call Claire when a ruckus erupted outside her door. She took a look and there was that same blank face, now pulled back into a rictus of despair and rage, teeth exposed, foaming at the mouth. Striking out wildly, three big street cops trying to subdue the person, Gen wasn’t sure about gender here. Cuffing behind the back was always safer, even with wrists shackled to waist. It was a lesson that somehow did not become policy, she didn’t know why.
“What’s the problem?” she asked the demented prisoner.
Gargled gasp, hissing, more foam from mouth. Drug reaction, it seemed. Gen winced as the cuffed hands together swung into the ribs of one of the cops. Would leave a bruise, but the cop hooked an arm through the arms of the afflicted person and simply lifted the person bodily off feet; struggle availed nothing, and a wickedly fast attempt to bite only bit a thrust hat, stunning the prisoner. The others pressed in and a Taser shot arched the prisoner back and into a wrap held out by another cop. The wrap was like an armless straitjacket. Off they carried the person.
“To the hospital,” Gen said, but of course they were already headed that way, and only nodded before disappearing down the hall. Bellevue was conveniently nearby.
“Does anyone know what that was about?” Gen called to those down the hall, minding other business.
“Bad shit in Kips Bay,” Sergeant Fripp said. “This is the third one today.”
“Ah hell.”
Bad drugs were always the bane of the city, right back to the demon rum. She never saw the point. To her anything beyond a beer was illness, if not hell. Here it was 8 a.m. on a fine breezy morning, poor person foaming at the mouth. People were strange.
“Do we know where they got it?”
“Looks like the Park Thirty-three area. Someone said Mezzrow’s.”
“Really?”
“That’s what she said.”
“That’s not like them.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Gen thought it over. “I guess I should go and have a word with them, see what’s up. It isn’t like them.”
“Do you want any of us along?”
“I’ll take Claire and Ezra.”