Page 44 - Three Adventures

Deflator Mouse

gloating warheads were in the act of extricating large sacks, marked
“$$$”, from the topless building—whose lintel was inscribed
“DEFLATVS MOVSE”.
“I don’t get it,” she snapped, evidently no longer in possession of
good humor.
“Just one more,” wheedled Captain Jack. The second drawing was
a trap; he had excised its caption. Anyone who knew it should have
been there would have betrayed something. Anything. Edith Tweazell
merely confirmed the dilemma on whose horns he squirmed like a
worm on a fishhook: the tough characters who were guilty as hell
always managed to guts it out and maintain their innocence right up
the gallows steps; and the weak-kneed chicken-hearts with nothing
on their hands but soap and water could be counted on to waffle and
cringe and give all the signs of concealed complicity. If only he could
strap all these wise-asses into a lie-detector and stick it to them! This
time Edith laughed, or coughed. A trendy young man in a singles bar
was sketched in the act of presenting himself proudly to a trendy
young woman of dubious mien. A crudely-lettered “Mouse Wine”
had been superimposed on the label of the bottle from which the
couple was drinking. “Me?” the fellow explained, in the grafted text,
“I work on a Death Ray; of course, I’m not allowed to show it to
anyone.”
She handed the sheaf of cartoons back to Captain Jack. “Yeah,”
she said, turning back to her softly-purring computer terminal. “Go
ahead. They’ll do.”
“Eh? How’s that, ma’am?”
“For the newsletter. The Litmus Paper. Go on. Submit them. But do
it anonymously: I won’t tell anyone they came from you.”
Lampson turned away, eyebrows in conflict. “Thanks,” he
muttered. This was not getting him anywhere. As long he was forced
to treat the Deflator Mouse incidents as little more than sophomoric
high jinks, he couldn’t get the staff to treat his interest in them as
anything more than over-zealousness. The raw materials for the
cartoons were as common as waiting-room magazines and park-
bench newspapers. The broadcast memo had no fingerprints at all;
electrons told no tales. That left only one piece of physical evidence:
the poster. Captain Jack returned to his office and unlocked the
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