Smooth move, Ex-Lax," she says, climbing back into Ng's van. Her throat feels thick and swollen. Maybe it's from screaming, maybe it's the toxic waste, maybe she's getting ready to gag. "Didn't you know about the snipers?" she says. If she can keep talking about the details of the job, maybe she can keep her mind off of what the Whirlwind Reaper did.
I didn't know about the one on the water tower," Ng says. "But as soon as he fired a couple of rounds, we plotted the bullets' trajectories on millimeter-wave and back-traced them." He talks to his van and it pulls out of its hiding place, headed for I-405.
Seems like kind of an obvious place to look for a sniper.
He was in an unfortified position, exposed from all sides," Ng says. "He chose to work from a suicidal position. Which is not a typical behavior for drug dealers. Typically, they are more pragmatic. Now, do you have any other criticisms of my performance
Well, did it work
Yes. The tube was inserted into a sealed chamber inside the helicopter before it discharged its contents. It was then flash-frozen in liquid helium before it could chemically self-destruct. We now have a sample of Snow Crash, something that no one else has been able to get. It is the kind of success on which reputations such as mine are constructed.
How about the Rat Things?" "How about them
Are they back in the van now? Back there?" Y.T. jerks her head aft.
Ng pauses for a moment Y.T. reminds herself that he is sitting in his office in Vietnam in 1955 watching all of this on TV.
Three of them are back," Ng says. "Three are on their way back. And three of them I left behind to carry out additional pacification measures.
You're leaving them behind
They'll catch up," Ng says. "On a straightaway, they can run at seven hundred miles per hour.
Is it true they have nuke stuff inside of them
Radiothermal isotopes.
What happens if one gets busted open? Everyone gets all mutated
If you ever find yourself in the presence of a destructive force powerful enough to decapsulate those isotopes," Ng says, "radiation sickness will be the least of your worries.
Will they be able to find their way back to us
Didn't you ever watch Lassie Come Home when you were a child?" he asks. "Or rather, more of a child than you are now
So. She was right. The Rat Things are made from dog parts.
That's cruel," she says.
This brand of sentimentalism is very predictable," Ng says.
To take a dog out of his body -- keep him in a hutch all the time.
When the Rat Thing, as you call it, is in his hutch, do you know what he's doing
Licking his electric nuts
Chasing Frisbees through the surf. Forever. Eating steaks that grow on trees. Lying beside the fire in a hunting lodge. I haven't installed any testicle-licking simulations yet, but now that you have brought it up, I shall consider it.
What about when he's out of the hutch, running around doing errands for you
Can't you imagine how liberating it is for a pit bull terrier to be capable of running seven hundred miles an hour
Y.T. doesn't answer. She is too busy trying to get her mind around this concept.
Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms -- like me -- are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before.
Where do you get the pit bulls from
An incredible number of them are abandoned every day, in cities all over the place.
You cut up pound puppies
We save abandoned dogs from certain extinction and send them to what amounts to dog heaven.
My friend Roadkill and I had a pit bull. Fido. We found it in an alley. Some asshole had shot it in the leg. We had a vet fix it up. We kept it in this empty apartment in Roadkill's building for a few months, played with it every day, brought it food. And then one day we came to play with Fido, and he was gone. Someone broke in and took him away. Probably sold him to a research lab.
Probably," Ng says, "but that's no way to keep a dog.
It's better than the way he was living before.
There's a break in the conversation as Ng occupies himself with talking to his van, maneuvering onto the Long Beach Freeway, headed back into town.
Do they remember stuff?" Y.T. says.
To the extent dogs can remember anything," Ng says. "We don't have any way of erasing memories.
So maybe Fido is a Rat Thing somewhere, right now.
I would hope so, for his sake," Ng says.