Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [122]
“What are you doing, Flinx? You heard what the crazy old militant said: the detonators on my legs can't be switched off electronically. They're simple on-off switches. In order to disable them you have to get them off me.” An edge crept into her voice. “Why aren't you getting them off me, Flinx?”
“Because I can't reach them without splitting or cracking the foam and setting it off. But there's someone who can.”
Digging through the growing pile of sequestered weaponry and personal instrumentation, he evaluated and discarded one item after another before finally settling on a miniholo disk. It was round, it was small, and it was the closest thing to a button-sized detonator he had been able to scrounge from the pile. As a puzzled Clarity looked on, he grabbed Pip gently by the neck and drew her head downward. He showed her the disk, emphasizing its importance by emanating concomitant heightened emotions of longing and desire. Then he dropped it down the front of his shirt.
Clarity had heard him talk to the minidrag on numerous occasions. This, however, was the first time she had ever heard him use the word “fetch.”
For an alien non-Terran pseudo-reptiloid whose body shape was an excellent example of interstellar parallel evolution, Pip was moderately intelligent. Even so, she was no dog, far less a dolphin. Flinx had to repeat the demonstration several times before she got the idea. His feeling of accomplishment when she finally wriggled down his shirtfront to recover the dropped disk and then slithered back out his open collar holding it in her mouth was the equal of any triumph he had experienced recently.
Leaving the mound of confiscated gear, he returned to Clarity. Gently unwinding Pip's coils, he placed her on Clarity's left shoulder with her triangular-shaped head facing the slight opening at her neck. Holding the miniholo disk in his other hand, he mimed dropping it into the narrow space between her throat and the hardened explosive foam. Wings folded tightly against her sides, the flying snake immediately ducked down into the opening and disappeared into the gap.
A moment passed. Clarity's expression contorted. She gave every sign of trying to move, to get away, but imprisoned within the solidified froth she was unable to do little more than twitch. Flinx was suddenly concerned. She had not raised any objections to his serpentine stratagem, and living as she did with Scrap the last thing he expected was for her to show any kind of irrational fear of intimate proximity to Pip.
“What's wrong? Try not to move so much—you might accidentally impact the foam and set off a reaction.”
“I am trying!” she shot back, just before she lapsed into uncontrollable giggling. “I can't help it—she tickles!”
The laughter subsided along with the stimulation when Pip's head reappeared beneath her chin. Flinx broke out in a wide grin. Gripped firmly in the minidrag's sharp teeth, the thumbnail-sized detonator trailed shreds of the tape that had secured it to her right thigh. The empathetic warmth that now passed between man and minidrag was as deep and true as any spoken expression of satisfaction.
He examined the recovered detonator closely. It was small, but not so small that it couldn't conceal within its slim plastic body some kind of backup triggering system. He laid it carefully aside. At his urging Pip made three more trips down Clarity's front, bringing forth the remaining three detonators along with concurrent bursts of uncontrollable laughter that gradually faded in intensity. When all four detonators had been recovered, he induced the flying snake to make one more exploratory slither. This additional excursion took three times as long as any of its four predecessors. Finally emerging, the