We Install Read Free

scented soap. (Testing the recodifier on the mouse and calibrating the long-range version do take a little while, you know.) To be precise—which we’d better be, in a story involving a mad scientist—Kate is discoursing about scented soap. A bad habit, discoursing. Kate is firmly convinced of the superiority of lime to frangipani, sandalwood, or any other scent in the explored universe. Very firmly convinced.
    One of the other bridesmaids whispers to Stacey, “She’s even starting to look like a lime.”
    â€œIt’s just the fluorescent lighting.” Stacey, after all, has spent time around a mad scientist. She’s tried to explain impossible things before.
    But it’s not just the fluorescent lighting, and things keep right on getting impossibler. Kate’s complexion goes from lime to Hass avocado: dark green and bumpylumpy. More and more bumpylumpy. Scaly, even. Where has that muzzle come from, with all those sharp teeth? To say nothing of the tail? No, we have to tell some kind of tale of the telltale tail, but not much.
    Kate starts to say something else, presumably more about the magnificent wonderfulness of lime. What comes out, however, isn’t exactly English. It isn’t even approximately English. It’s a bubbling shriek of about the volume you would use if you wanted to set Mount Everest running for an air-raid shelter.
    What else comes out is a blast of fire. It’s Kate’s very first one, so it’s not a huge blast of fire. But it’s plenty to set several cardboard boxes burning, and it’s plenty to make the giggle of bridesmaids stop giggling and start running. Running like hell, if, once more, you want to be precise.
    The Bed, Bath and Beyond sales staff also opt for Beyond, and at top speed, too. Their customer-service training does not involve dealing with dinosaurian monsters, even ones that just stop in for soap.
    Kate follows them out of the store. She hasn’t fully figured out what’s happened to her. Well, neither has anyone else but Professor Tesla Kidder, and he’s off in another part of the narrative somewhere. She tries to complain. More bubbling shrieks come forth. So does more flame. Lots more flame. She’s getting the hang of it.
    When you are on fire, a man once said from agonizing personal experience, people get out of your way. And they get out of your way even faster when you breathe fire. Panic roars through the clothed mall-rats of Northridge.
    â€œRun for your life!” a woman screams. “It really is Bridezilla!”
    How can she tell? Simple. On the second digit of Kate’s left forepaw (not the fourth, because the forepaw has only two digits once the genetic recodifying gets done) still sparkles Archie Kidder’s two-carat rock.
    And when people aren’t running, they’re aiming cell-phone cameras at Kate and zapping the stills and videos to every TV station and newspaper in town (lots of the former; not much left of the latter). Some of them even think to call the police, the fire department, and the SPCA.
    Media frenzies have been built from less. From much less, to tell you the truth. Cars, vans, and all the helicopters not covering the latest freeway chase—say, about as many as the Brazilian Air Force owns—converge on the Northridge Mall. “Dinosaur runs amok!” a blow-dried airhead shouts breathlessly into his mike. “Details after this message!”
    Before the impotence-drug commercial can even finish, Professor Tesla Kidder’s cell phone blorps. Mm, how would you describe the noise a theremin makes? And what else would a mad scientist use for a ring tone?
    â€œYes?” he says.
    â€œNo,” his wife tells him firmly. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but stop doing it. Undo it, if you can—and you’d better be able to.” She hangs up before he can get out even one more word.
    And, before he can put the phone back in