Of Traps and Lace, Chapter Three

Beneath the conurbation ran a sombre pillared labyrinth where the oldest buildings’ foundations were found. Into its echoes and half-light Plunder Dacks and Petunia had fled, fearing to stay on the street. Eerie noises making their way to them through the cavernous subterrania reminded both that even down here they might not be alone for long.

“Those are space-car engines overhead,” murmured Dacks. “They’re looking for us.”

Finding some flagstones that were dry underfoot the couple quietly sat, continuing to cling to one another so they ended up face-to-face and close.

Petunia beamed her bravest smile at the wan countenance before her. “The last time I was waiting for the shuttle after my show, I saw they had a new Earth-foods vending machine at the station. It would have been a lot for a boy who just has an orange! Anyway I ordered one kind of chocolate bar and ooh, it had fondant inside.”

Her long-lashed violet eyes closed.

“It was lovely. There was one with a different-coloured wrapper and that looked lovely too. I’m going to try it, the next time I’m there,” Petunia finished.

She did not do so without sighing. It was conspicuous to herself and Dacks that an anecdote meant to cheer the pair of them up had ended with Petunia out in the lonely comfortless night.

“We could always go and live at Nottingham,” he suggested. “I don’t think anyone would mind, Petunia.”

“Her sister, you mean!” she flung back, as one choking on her own anguish. “Because that’s who she is, that one of the Mini-Flashes who’s most after us.”

Petunia sniffled.

“How can he be so right for me, and his choices so wrong?”

Plunder Dacks looked so pettish that less restrictive underwear might have been indicated, and if ever a boy was spoilt for choice.

“I suppose, then, Petunia, that what you told those selfsame Mini-Flashes earlier on was all it sounded, both affirmation and riposte? You might as well just say you think I’m worse! For Petunia, I hardly think you and I are quite in a position to start giving serious thought to opening up our own Earth-foods outlet!”

To this pertinaciousness Petunia made a far gentler riposte than the prior one referred to. She moved her peach-scented presence with every peanut-butter hint nearer still to Dacks’s nostrils. The all-but inscrutable beauty of her lineaments wracked him with self-reproach. Indeed she had never ever done anything like this before. Great was Plunder Dacks’s heart and increasingly uncomfortable his rubber pants.

“There’s so much,” breathed Petunia. “So much that you’ve never known. Scampi fries and round flat mushrooms and even whole button mushrooms deep-fried in crumb!”

“I don’t know what any of those things are, Petunia,” replied Dacks, almost in tears. “When I hear you talk about them I can only hope they’re something nice. They should be, because you like them, and you’re ever so nice! But Petunia…sometimes I’m so afraid…!”

Her smile in that secret underworld was like unto a star.

“Snigglybobbles,” she whispered. “And I’ve never called anyone that except Flashtease.”

If what followed for Plunder Dacks was peachy paradise then he thought it very well-named, and if hard work it was the sort worth having a good go at all the same. Petunia’s breath reached him in quick little gusts. He was enjoying it, even if it fell a bit short of getting them out of their scrape! From behind the row of pillars, headlamps flared.

Dacks shrieked: “Yoopy yoo!”

Each Mini-Flash in the slowing space-rod saw shadow-bars flick like dominoes over a tableau of flurry and unrest. Plunder Dacks’s tail-end, bereft of Baumgaartens, was glimpsed enroute for the tunnels. His partner in crime, though she had more clothing to correct than he did, had been far more thorough about it and was hastening daintily surface-wards amid all her accustomed frilly flutter. Bobbypins parked the car, and dispatching a pair of girls after Dacks led the larger party in final pursuit of the panties that were their prey.

“After what I said to them I’m never going to live this down,” Petunia muttered.

4-H-N ached all over. At least the flat-roofed building she’d aimed at had meant a shorter drop than the one to the pavement, and the stinging of her grazed palms and knees paid more than adequate tribute to her success in landing flat on her face as she’d wished. The ink-bottle was still in one piece, even if 4-H-N wasn’t quite sure she herself was. With one hand she groped behind her and tugged a layer of beige between the galaxy and her precious cargo in its white silk hammock, then slowly picked herself up.

Micro-Mallet was before her, maintaining a brave hover though oil was leaking from his ravaged underside. In one of the apertures meant for 4-H-N’s feet lay the camera, not looking its best but hanging in there. Every exterior pain, taken together, could not have brought forth the tears that sprang from 4-H-N’s eyes at this sight.

“I hurt you,” she sobbed to Micro-Mallet, anguished.

“She hurt me,” Micro-Mallet corrected her.

“It’ll only happen to you again with me for a friend,” said 4-H-N bitterly. “You and the camera go patch yourselves up while you still can. I’ve got this.”

“I’m with you to the end, Miss 4-H-N,” was the devoted one’s reply. “We both are. We can still do it the way you wanted.”

They could, too. 4-H-N saw that. With the help of her companions she might yet persuade Petunia of her folly through words alone, and film the debate so the rest of the sector might be taught too. She had risked all and suffered much tonight in the name of this goal. Now a chance remained for her to make it happen. Forget the ink. 4-H-N would have extracted the bottle and flung it away across the rooftop there and then, only it wasn’t hers, and two wrongs didn’t make a right. There would be greater satisfaction anyway in clapping the thing down unopened beneath its lawful owner’s silly button-nose, once the fight which she, Meteor, had desired from the beginning was won in the only way that mattered.

4-H-N stooped, and kissed Micro-Mallet on his prow. In the smile she gave him was the strength he had lent. Then turning she struck off along the city skyline, leaping from roof to roof like a beige blur with her faithful friend flying beside her.

END OF CHAPTER THREE