He'd been thinking like a star, that's what the trouble was. His father had warned him about that. How money and fame can go to your head, make you feel you were special, like your shit didn't stink.
"And you are special, Dodger," John Valentine had said. "You're special to me, and you have a special talent. A special art. But it doesn't give you the right to be impolite."
And certainly not the right to contradict his father in public. What could he have been thinking? They were a team, surely, but a team had to have a leader, and John Valentine was older and stronger and wiser. He'd been there. He'd seen it and done it. Dodger was still learning.
"Dirty laundry is only to be aired backstage," John Valentine had told his son many times. "Never before the audience. And never in front of the producer."
What had he been thinking?
Well, they'd work it out. He would survive this, and he and his father would be a team again. They'd talk things over in the dressing room, like they always did. They'd present a united front on everything.
Dodger pressed his face against the wall. He was as far from the door as he could get. Maybe it would be safer not to look. Maybe he could cower here, keep his back to the thing, and it would overlook him.
Fat chance.
Unlikely the monster would miss him, and impossible that he could last five seconds without looking.
He didn't last one second.
It started very loudly, as the air tried to force itself through the tiny crack. A shriek, deafening, reminding Dodger of a film he'd seen where an evil witch was pushed into a deep well, screaming all the way down. Screaming, but getting fainter, more distant. This sound quickly lost all its punch, too. The air around Dodger plucked at his clothes with cold fingers, pulled at him, became an instant gale that puffed out his cheeks and drove ice picks into his ears, and brought up a monstrous belch from deep inside him. Then there was nothing but the ringing silence, a sound he knew was not a sound but his tortured ears crying in agony. He turned around.
His heart turned to stone. The Daewoo Caterpillar was there. And it wasn't just lurking in the shadows this time, it was lurching toward him. It was huge, a thing of metal teeth and flailing arms and a hideous, bright yellow body and six great glassy eyes. It reached out one skeletal hand toward Dodger, and the cylinder began to turn. Dodger was frozen tight to the spot, watching in dreadful fascination. Would the door turn away in time, or would the creature reach inside and begin feasting?
With the silence of death, the hand entered the doorway.
The inner-lock cylinder kept trying to close, but the claw was in the way. The lock stopped moving, retreated a few inches, and again tried to close. And again, and again, shuttling back and forth like the doors of an elevator when you stuck your hand between them. The creature seemed stymied by the door, but it wouldn't really matter much longer, because Dodger would soon be dead from lack of air.
So the Breathsucker would get him. If it's not one thing, it's another.
He started to slide down the side of the cylinder. Things were getting dark, blurry. He wiped at his eyes, and for a moment he thought he saw Elwood shoving the loathsome claw back into the outer darkness, thought he saw the cylinder begin to rotate again. Thought he felt Elwood's arms around him, cradling him, telling him it was going to be all right.
But that couldn't be true. How would Elwood get in here?
It was his last thought for some time.
Dodger woke to the smell of freshly washed sheets and the sound of a mockingbird's song. He didn't open his eyes for a while, fearing it was all too good to be true. That smell was one he associated with good times: high-class hotels he and his father lived in when the money was good. The sound was one he associated with Texas. And that couldn't be.
But it was. He opened his eyes and sat up. He was tucked into a bed in a small room made entirely of wood. Beside the bed was an open window that looked out on an oak tree only a few feet away. The mockingbird was perched on a branch until he saw Dodger. Then he chirped a few more notes and flew away.
Dodger lay back down. He'd been here before, and if he was here then everything must be all right.
He was on the second floor of an authentic wooden building on the dusty main street of New Austin, in the middle of the Texas disneyland. These were the medical offices of Drs. Henry Wauk, M.D., and Heinrich Wohl, D.D.S, "Quick and Relatively Painless Dentistry," according to the shingle hanging outside. He'd never met Dr. Wohl, but he'd seen Henry Wauk several times. His father had brought him in from time to time for what he thought of as "good, old-fashioned doctoring." But even John Valentine, with his ingrained suspicion of all things modern, had not subjected himself or his son to the sort of butchery that had been practiced in places like this in the 1800s. The archaic medical equipment in this room, the colorful jars of powders and elixirs, and the instruments of torture surrounding the dental chair in the other room were merely for show, as was pretty much everything in Texas. Valentine came here for checkups and physical repairs, when needed, because Henry Wauk was an old friend of his, and because Henry would do the work off the books. The Central Computer and its various legal minions held little sway in Texas, a fact that endeared the place and all the other disneylands to John Valentine. They were virtually independent states, immune to many of the intrusive regulations of the larger civilization.
"Social experiments, they call them," Valentine had said to his son, one day while they were out riding horses—real horses! Dodger had been in heaven—in the sagebrush country west of New Austin. "Living museums. They teach school the old-fashioned way in here, son. Back to basics. All the children learn to read, if you can believe that. They grow their own food, right in the dirt. They live in here, hold down jobs in here. Old jobs, like blacksmithing, and cooperage, and... and plenty of other things I don't pretend to know much about. They hold their own elections, and they don't pay taxes to Mama Luna. Misfits in here, most of them. People who weren't happy on the outside."
Dodger had thought it was odd to call the corridors of Luna "the outside," but he knew what his father meant. Here, there was the illusion of endless space, just like out on the surface. And Texas was pretty large: miles and miles, his father said.
"Doctor" Wauk was one of the misfits. His was no general anomie or existential despair, however. Wauk was what would have been called, in early Texas, a dipsomaniac. He had a fondness for the bottle that he was not willing to be cured of. It had made a disaster of his acting career, and he had finally accepted a part that was to be lived, instead of performed: that of the alcoholic sawbones beloved of old black-and-white westerns.
While Wauk did dispense patent remedies and salves and powders for a few ailments, all the real medical care was accomplished by a perfectly ordinary Medico machine concealed in a closet. More complex work was referred to a normal facility outside the disneyland. Wauk had been given the bare minimum of training to operate the Medico. "After all," as he'd told John Valentine, "it ain't like doctorin' is rocket science, or anything."
Dodger thought he could hear voices from the next room. He rolled out of bed and crept carefully to the door, pressed his ear against it. If he held his breath he could hear his father and Dr. Wauk talking, but he could only get every other word. He looked around and found an antique stethoscope in a drawer. He put the rubber tips in his ears and pressed the metal disk on the end to the wooden door, and the sounds became as clear as a telephone.