Chapter 9: To the Rescue
"Wake up! Wake up, you stupid Carpet!" demanded Irene Ironfist.
"Hummffph? Wha?"
"Wake up! Tonight, you're going to learn to fly!"
"Oh, go away. Let me sleep."
"I need you to fly me to the garret window of the Pseudopolis Yard station!"
"Yeah? Well, I need a pile of gold three feet high, but we both know that ain't gonna happen either."
"Wake up!" She grabbed the Carpet off the line where it'd been hung and flung it up into the night sky. "Flyyyyy!"
"What are you doing!" shrieked the Carpet as it wafted gently back down. "I'm falling! I'm falling!"
Irene snatched it from out of the air. "Listen to me! You're a flying carpet, a flying carpet! You were made to fly!"
"If carpets were meant to fly," whimpered the Carpet, "we'd have been given wings. I just want to lie on the floor and look up women's skirts."
Irene grabbed the Carpet in her fists and brought it up to her fury-filled face. "Listen to me, Carpet!" Then she heard what it had just said, "You really do need professional help. –But listen, tonight, you are flying!" She flung it into the sky again.
"No! No! No! Stop trying to kill me!" It came back down over the line, which it wrapped itself around like it was some kind of a rectangular subtractaconda (with tassels on each end). "Leave me alone! Leave me alone!" The Carpet blubbered.
Irene Ironfish took a frustrated step backwards and bumped into You Bastard, the fithy-tempered camel, whose sole job appeared to be smelling up the place.
۞
As Crackers flew back towards the zoo, he could feel the magic of the thaumic crystal metamorphosing him. He had already grown into a Lancre Crowhawk, one of the most psychotically vicious birds of prey to be found anywhere on the Disc, but yet he was still growing, still changing, and now he could feel himself becoming a Great Combovered Eagle.
۞
Mica al-Moor, bin Dere-dun-Dat and Kasbah Bill came stomping out of the darkness and up the gangplank of the ship. Each was wearing a ballet tutu (pastel yellow, pastel pink and pastel green), each was wearing a pair of swim fins, each had on a beanie with a propeller on the top, and each had a stuffed parrot on his shoulder (except Kasbah Bill's stuffed parrot had had its head ripped off and replaced with a candy cane).
"Er, gentlemen" stammered Ferrari, "where, where, where - - ?"
A warning figure shot out from bin Dere-dun-Dat. "Don't even get me started!" He led his two shipmates towards their bunks. "Gentlemen," he said through gritted teeth. "We are going to go to sleep now. When we wake up in the morning, we shall discover this was all a very, very, very, very bad dream."
"Hutt, hutt - - get out of the way! – - hutt hutt!" Irene Ironfist barreled by atop of You Bastard, nearly knocking three men over. The camel raced down the gangplank and off into the darkness. "Hutt hutt!"(1)
۞
Corporate Nobby Nobbs, carrying Oh-Oh the monkey, arrived at the front gates to the city zoo. They were locked, as he knew they would be. He hallooed, but there was no answer, as he knew there wouldn't be. Yet he was acting under orders, bloody stupid orders to be sure, but orders is orders.
He walked along the fence wondering what to do with the bloody monkey. After some distance, he came to the monkey house. There, just beyond the wall, were all the bloody monkeys and all the bloody apes a man could bloody well shake a stick out. But he was on the wrong bloody side of the bloody wall.
So, he chucked the critter over.
Problem solved.
1 A word about how camels run. Most zoologists classify them as quadrupeds. Not true. All appearances aside, a camel does not have four legs, but twelve. The eight legs you don't see (except for their kneecaps) are located in another dimension. So it is little wonder than a four-legged, twelve-kneecapped camel can get up to remarkable speeds.
