The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [3]
The difference between them was that Whispr knew it. He’d always been aware of his mental limitations. Maybe that was why he had chosen a meld that rendered him even more inconspicuous than most. Jiminy was an audacious, even impudent hunter. Whispr was shy.
And wary. As Cricket labored to finish the job, his slender companion glanced more and more frequently at the street. No cops showed themselves, no guides or handlers sought their waylaid subject. For an improv hunt it had gone very well.
The sweat that coursed down Whispr’s rapier-thin body did not arise from unease. The Carolina coast was sufficient inspiration for the perspiration. Anymore, it was hot and tropical all the time, no different climatologically from the east coast of central Brazil. In the old days, it was said, fall and winter had been cool, occasionally even chilly. Such weather was gone with the Change. Savannah was as tropical as Salvador.
Maybe, Whispr mused, he would have his sweat glands removed one day. He knew those who’d had it done. But the resultant requisite panting that was required to compensate for the meld was unattractive, and inspired too many inescapable jokes of the canine persuasion.
“I wonder what he did, this guy,” he found himself muttering aloud.
Jiminy replied without looking up from his work. “Some kind of scribe, maybe. Or accountant. He sure didn’t get by on his physical attributes.” He grunted slightly as he struggled to dissolve remaining connective tissue without damaging the linkages to the prosthetic. “Visiting from New York, or London. Hope he had the chance to enjoy some good Southern cooking before we made his acquaintance. There!”
The hand came off cleanly in Jiminy’s fingers. There was only a little blood. The Cricket was no surgeon, but he took pride in his work. Whispr made an effort to suppress his natural melancholy. He tried to envision the gleam that would come into Swallower’s eyes when he set all four of them—two natural and two melds—on the dismembered body part. For Whispr and the Cricket, he told himself with the slightest of grins, money was at hand.
It was as his companion was stowing their five-fingered prize in his scruffy backpack that Whispr noticed the thread.
It caught his eye only because the indirect light in the alley made it stand out slightly from those surrounding it and because he had been kneeling over the body of the dead man long enough for the cadaverish topography to become familiar. Had he passed the man in the street, had he stopped to converse with him, it never would have drawn Whispr’s notice. Time, light, and circumstance conspired to reveal it.
Leaning close over the body’s motionless chest, he drew a mag from one of his pockets. Slipped over his right eye, it automatically adjusted to his vision. Gently squeezing or releasing the muscles around the ocular orbit increased or reduced the magnification.
His interest had not been misplaced. Beneath the lens he could just make out the minuscule hinges that held the top and bottom of the thread in place inside the dead man’s breast pocket.
“Let me have your tweezers.” Without taking his eye off the pocket, he extended a hand toward his partner.
Jiminy gazed edgily toward the busy street as he fumbled for the requested tool. When he was sitting down, the kneecaps of his elongated legs rose higher than his head, making him look more like his arthropodal namesake than ever.
“Here—what’d you find? Concealed credit stick?”
“Naw—I don’t know what it is. Sewn inside the pocket. Maybe it’s a storage device.” As the perfectly miniaturized hinges yielded to the pointed tips of the tweezers the top end of the thread came free. “Leastwise, one end’s