Spraying For Bugs
Chapter Ten of The Troika
I was told what to do, and I did what I was told. If I forgot where I was going, my Comptroller would remind me. If I ignored him, he repeated himself. People’s houses filled up with bugs, so they phoned my Comptroller. Then he would send me out to spray. People didn’t want to be bothered with bugs. People wanted to melt in peace. I could relate to that. I would have liked to be left in peace. But someone had to spray.
I knew a lot about bugs. My ROM included A Bestiary of the Urban Insects of North America, updated to 1996. The carapace of the Pea Scaler ranges from drab brown in winter to brilliant yellow—the sting of the Giant House Centipede—Sometimes I’d run it through my voice coder at high speed. Bug jabber.
I was in a disgraceful condition. I should not have been working. My transmission fluid was seeping, there were bubbles in my tires, and my solenoid was out of adjustment. I should have been up on a lift, with grease monkeys packing my wheel bearings.
All it took out there was the irrevocable snap of one brittle fan belt, and you’d be dead on the shoulder of some desolate industrial drag, and the car strippers would come down like flies. But the City didn’t consider that. The City needed every vehicle it could muster in those desperate days. If it moved, put it to work! That was their philosophy. Who was I to complain? I couldn’t feel pain. Neither can bugs, but bugs at least can die. Bugs do have that advantage over machines.
A dummy sat in my driver’s seat. He didn’t drive me. He was just part of my equipment. There wasn’t any steering wheel, so he kept his gloves in his lap. He had black leather gloves, black leather boots, and no hands or feet in them. The gloves and the boots were his hands and feet.
He was called a Mobile Unit because he could get out of me and walk around. His coat was black vinyl, and his pants, and his cap, and his face. Dual cameras were mounted in his head. Their lens covers were gridded red glass, like a stoplight. I could see through his eyes or talk from the speaker in his neck. I could swivel his head or tap his feet. I could send him into houses and use him to spray for bugs.
When I was a garage truck, I’d had a similar Mobile Unit to empty the trash cans. Sometimes he’d even scrape up Melters. Certain Melters didn’t rate the ambulance treatment—dumpster people, people who melted in public toilets, people like that.
Garbage collection had ended a year earlier, but the City still sent teams around to spray the fresh garbage with a foam that hardened around it. Phenomenal, the things they were doing with plastics. People were dropping like flies, but the new plastics were breeding like rabbits. It gave one hope for the future.
I turned north from East Sixteenth into a graveled alley between Stone and Russell. To the west was a junk-strewn vacant lot. North of the lot stood a row of two-yard-wide mini-apartments, with aerials and swamp coolers on their roofs and bulbous mounds of petrified foamed-over garbage leaning against them in the alley. To the east, the back yards of houses, behind storm fence. I parked beside a house reputed to be the residence of a Mrs. Everson. My turbines wound down. I filed a status report by tightbeam. It was a punishing day in August, 1:27 p.m.
I raised the dummy’s hand and unbuckled his harness. I unlatched the driver’s door and pushed it open. Swiveled the dummy’s legs out of my cab. Somehow got both of his boots planted on the gravel. Slammed the door behind him and turned him toward the back end of me. All very complicated, if you thought about it too much.
I opened the rear doors and dragged out my canvas pouch and my tool belt. I hung the pouch on my shoulder and stuffed it with spray guns and a cross-section of aerosol toxins. I had pesticides for ants, spiders, roaches, fleas, silverfish, or armored slugs.
A mangy dog trotted up the alley with a scrap of greasy butcher paper in its mouth. It didn’t even look at me. I had no scent. I walked up to the storm fence and followed it south until I came to a gate, chained and padlocked. I hung my gloves on the wire and thought for a while. Luckily I had a bolt cutter on my tool belt.
