there were! Shabble was terrified.
Nevertheless, the shining one played it ultra-cool.
‘Oh, hi!’ said Shabble, speaking Code Seven to the dorgi. ‘Why, what a surprise! I didn’t see you there! Don’t worry about us, we’re just passing through.’ So saying, Shabble started to drift away down the corridor. ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry about us, we’ll find our own way thank you.’ ‘HALT! HALT RIGHT NOW!’
To emphasise its commands, the dorgi trained the seven snouts of its zulzer on the slow-drifting Shabble. Under the threat of the zulzer the demon of Jod came to an abrupt halt. The zulzer could not kill the lordly persecutor of cats, but was quite capable of destroying the transponder linking the feckless one with the local cosmos. Once that was destroyed Shabble would be deaf, blind and helpless. Trapped in a different universe entirely. Mute, blind and bereft of kinaesthetic sensation. Alone, alone, doomed to be alone, unloved, uncherished and unbefriended, all alone and hideously lonely for all the rest of eternity.
Hence Shabble regarded the d° ^ r gi ^ an d its zulzer with nothing short of horror.
The dorgi spoke again:
‘Halt! Halt! Right now! Drop your weapons! Move up against the wall! Halt! Or you will be eliminated!’
If Shabble could sweat, then Shabble would have been sweating then. The shining one had absolutely no idea what to do. But while Shabble vacillated, the killer Tolon unshipped a knife. What good would that do? Not much.
Tolon might as well have armed himself with an ostrich feather. But he didn’t know that. He had never met a dorgi before. He had no idea what he was up against.
None of the other humans had ever met a dorgi either — but some of them were already making some acute guesses as to its nature.
‘What is that thing?’ said Guest Gulkan. ‘What’s it saying?’
‘It’s saying we’re chin-deep in something unpleasant,’ said Thayer Levant.
‘Never mind,’ said Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, with a confidence which was entirely feigned. ‘I’m sure our guide can handle it.’
‘Our guide is a Shabble,’ said Pelagius Zozimus, ‘and I wouldn’t trust a Shabble to do so much as cook a pancake. Get ready to run!’
The dorgi was getting angry. It was working itself up into a killing rage. In a roar of fury it said:
‘Now! Now! Against the wall! Or else!’
In extremis, Shabble was seized by inspiration.
Said Shabble, in a perfect imitation of Anaconda Stogirov, the immortal Chief of Security of the Golden Gulag:
‘Let me pass with my prisoners.’
There was an ominous rumble from the dorgi.
‘I have an Absolute Authorisation!’ said Shabble, still using Stogirov’s voice. ‘You doubt? Then check your Security List! Now! Or I’ll have you dismantled. Bit by bit. Preserving your pain circuits intact until the very end.’ The dorgi growled again. But backed off a bit. It began to check the Vocal Identities preserved in its Security List. Then the dorgi rumbled in discontent. It had checked Shabble’s Vocal Identity against the Security List. According to the check, Shabble was in fact Anaconda Stogirov. But Stogirov was human, female, 567 incas high, 96 noks in weight, and had blue eyes, red hair and fair skin.
This then was the problem which troubled the dorgi: could Anaconda Stogirov have been ablated and reshaped in a fashion radical enough to leave her with the outward appearance of a Shabble, that is to say a shiny free-floating globe the size of an orange? The dorgi grunted strenuously. A problem indeed! For it knew virtually nothing of human anatomy, and equally as little about the internal construction of Shabbies.
Even as the dorgi watched, the globe was changing. It was radiating heat. It was becoming a fireball. Could humans do that? The dorgi hunted through its memory banks. Yes! Humans radiate heat! No! Humans die at fireball heat! Yes! Humans clad in reflective materials dare such heat! No! No! Yes Yes! No no no! Yes!
In desperate doubt, the dorgi consulted its Supreme Directive. This was very simple, and tells us a lot about the Golden Gulag:
1. WHEN IN DOUBT, QUESTION.
2. IF STILL IN DOUBT, TORTURE.
3. IF STILL IN DOUBT, KILL.
4. IF NOW NOT ENTIRELY SATISFIED WITH AREA SECURITY THEN PROCEED WITH AREA DESTRUCTION.
Instantly the dorgi became calm. That was the Law. The dorgi need only follow the Law. Furthermore, it could be as rude and as violent as it wanted to be as long as it did follow the Law. The dorgi had already executed Instruction One. Therefore it must go straight to Instruction Two. This intruder must be tortured!
‘I hear Stogirov,’ said the dorgi, ‘but I see a Shabble. A delinquent Shabble! Imitating a human! You will be escorted to a therapist immediately for interrogation in depth.’
‘There are no therapists,’ said Shabble boldly. ‘They’re all dead.’
‘There is a functional therapist on level 433,’ said the dorgi in tones of ponderous menace.
A dorgi does not lie. A dorgi is a primitive mechanism which is incapable of anything as sophisticated as a fiction. A dorgi is however capable of error. But the possibility of error in this case was vanishingly small. When a dorgi says that a therapist exists then a therapist truly must exist.
‘All right, all right,’ said Shabble, gaining height slowly so as not to alarm the dorgi. ‘I’ll come quietly.’
‘Then descend 934 incas and proceed along the corridor.’ ‘Which corridor?’ said Shabble, rolling slowly through the air toward the blue-lit branch of the Downstairs maze which its prisoners had so recently considered as an escape route.
‘This one!’ said the dorgi. ‘The one we’re in!’
‘Oh, this one!’ said Shabble, accelerating.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the dorgi. ‘But not so fast! And descend! Descend I say! Halt! You are going too fast! Halt or I shoot! Halt! Halt! Halt!’
The dorgi’s alarm klaxon blared. It was the final warning — as Shabble knew full well. Shabble blasted the dorgi with fire hot enough to melt forged steel. The dorgi shrugged off the onslaught — but was momentarily blinded. In that moment, Shabble span furiously, spitting out twenty-seven Shabble-sized fireballs.
The dorgi recovered its powers of sight. It stared dis-believingly at the twenty-eight Shabbies hanging in the air. What the hell was going on here? Well: shoot first, ask questions afterwards! The dorgi opened fire, trying to gun down all twenty-eight Shabbies simultaneously. It was so busy shooting at fireballs that it temporarily forgot about the humans.
The humans were already running.
They sprinted, collided, fell, rolled, scrambled, recovered, ducked, dodged, then threw themselves into the blue-lit side corridor. Behind them, the deafening thunder of the zulzer ruled all. Chunks of plax exploded from the walls. Shabble skidded round the corner into the blue-lit corridor, counted the humans — all seven were there — then urged them to action.
‘Brodirov kanamensky!’
‘What?’ said Zozimus.
‘Shavaunt!’ said Shabble, reverting to Toxteth.
The humans got the hint, and, dizzy and dazed though they were, they started running. Their overlord was pleased to see the one called Arnaut still had tight hold of the wishstone.
In the main corridor, the thunder of the zulzer continued for quite some time. The dorgi only stopped shooting when it had exhausted all its ammunition. It looked for corpses. There were none. Maybe the zulzer had atomised them. Maybe.
‘We’ll see,’ said the dorgi.
It consulted an image-record of its onslaught of the corridor and did a spectral analysis of the same. Unfortunately, spectral analysis indicated that no large carbon-based lifeforms had been destroyed. Also, the Shabble appeared to have escaped.
‘Sinvoco senvoco sabvoco!’ said the dorgi, nearly overloading its obscenity circuits.
The intruders had got clean away.
The dorgi did an Advanced Situational Analysis, grunting at the pain of such intellectual analysis. Then
