The Mean Carrot

by Rudy Rucker

For Richard Kadrey and Anselm Hollo

“Hi, I’m Molly. Do I know you?”

I hit him with my smile and widen my eyes. I touch him on his cheek. He’s young and handsome, but he’s very far from being a Californian. He startles. Shy, hopeful, scared. A tech bro in achingly tidy clothes.

“Now known,” says he. “I’ll message you a link to my page. You may research how awesome is Anselm Saarikoski from Helsinki. Biohacker for the Finn Junkers. Well known in cool circles.”

He wears sandals with socks, and he has a really large duffle bag at his feet. Like for a musical instrument, or maybe it’s a suitcase and he’s in the process of changing apartments.

The party is in a concrete yard behind a one-story wood house off Judah Street in San Francisco. So many parties I’ve been to this year, so many high hopes, so many nulls. While I’ve been partying it’s turned to fall. The chirpy, thuddy music is somehow heartbreaking. The way it mixes with the traffic’s hoarse roar, the beeping of drones, and the mad-house shrieks of unseen tweakers. None of us knows where we’re going.

My roommates and I are friends with the host, Qumar, who rents this place out for events. He’s a deal-maker and to some extent an artist. His human-scale animated holograms waver among us. Eyeball lava lamps, 3D graffiti, fauve zombies. A typical scene for me—soiled, hip and with noobs to prey on. Such as our man Anselm.

“I’m a contractor for One Wow,” I tell him.

“I know them,” says Anselm. “I’ve been hoping to meet a rep. That’s precisely why I appear at this party.”

“Perf!” I exclaim, patting his shoulder. “I guess you know we’re testing bio add-ons, We call the new one the stumble. Makes you feel goood.” I cock my head and look playful. “Want to try?”

“You’re rapid onset,” says Anselm.

“This is that kind of scene,” I tell him. “Net and get. Know and show.”

“I am ear,” says he. I’m not sure if it’s bad English, or if he’s poetic

“What do you like?” I ask him.

Anselm makes a gesture that takes in the motley guests, the shabby bungalows, and the one-percenters’ city beyond. Gives a gentle smile. “In Finland, to feel good, we go to a wooden sauna house. We sweat, whack ourselves with birch switches, jump in the lake. Tingly.”

“How could we best translate that into a San Francisco experience?” I ask.

“A naked hug with you?” he suggests. “If I dare dream. Is this rude?”

“Spill your soul, reindeer man.”

“I’m here all this month with my Mean Carrot. Exploring connections to high biotech, especially to One Wow. I am lonely. I forget how is love. The one in the zero, or the zero on the one?” Anselm sighs. “Vibrate your voice to me, kind Molly.”

“Who says I’m kind? You gonna wear a stumble for me or not?”

Right about now Anselm’s floppy duffel bag crawls onto my foot. I squawk and hop away. One end of the bag is tightly packed, but the end near me is almost empty. Something writhes beneath the nylon cloth.

“What is it?” I ask.

“He is a narrow orange cone, five feet long, with a twisting tip, and green leaves at his fat end.” Anselm is playing the robo-nerd. “He is not a reptile.” He gives me a quizzical, expectant look.

“This is supposed to be Twenty Questions?” I ask.

“Try harder.”

“Oh! He’s that Mean Carrot you talked about?”

Gravely Anselm nods. “He is a prototype grown by Finn Junkers for our biotech wizard, Gee Willikers. Gee is a biotech wizard. He consults both for us and for One Wow. But in the end he’s independent. A strange character.”

“He invented both huffy and stumble, right?” I say. “That huffy stuff nearly killed my friend Ramona. And stumble’s what we’re testing now.”

Right about now, the Mean Carrot humps up against my shin, and pulses against me like a dog. He’s still in his bag. The nylon is damp. I can’t take this.

“We’re done,” I tell Anselm, and turn away. I look for my roommate Ramona and see her working a prospect across the courtyard. Ramona and I watch each others’ backs. I’ll go join her.

Anselm’s face crumples like a child’s. He kicks the Mean Carrot’s bag so hard that he hurts his toe, which is no surprise, given that he’s wearing those guh-roovy sandals. He stands on one foot, holding his toe and moaning. I burst out laughing.

“Do use me for a test!” he begs. Are those tears in his eyes? Either this guy is a master con-man or he’s the biggest goob I ever met. Gingerly he puts his weight on his foot. Raises his forearms with his hands dangling down like puppy paws. “Please, maammo?”

“Do you have a car?” I ask. The duffel bag is motionless. The Mean Carrot is on his best behavior.

“I approximately have a car,” says Anselm. “Where would we go?”

“To my flat. South of Market. I share it with that woman over there. Ramona. With the black hair and the bangs? She’s bagging a mark too. The four of us will have a stumble party. Non-pharmaceutical. No birch branch beatings. And, Anselm, you park that skeevy Mean Carrot outside—or I’ll goddamn well chop him into disks.”

“One cannot so easily damage the Mean Carrot of Gee Willikers,” says Anselm. “The carrot is highly robust. He can function as a valet, an enforcer, or, if need be, an emergency medical tech. In any case, I accept that the Mean Carrot waits outside your apartment. He’ll keep my valuables safe.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“I make no judgments. I simply predict. Once you and I are in the apartment, you affix a stumble to my skull. Your collaborators monitor my reactions. I have a grand mal seizure, or no—” He closely studies my face, as if reading my thoughts. “I fall into a catatonic state. I experience some form of mercy sex. I awaken in the street. And the Mean Carrot resolves any and all outstanding issues.”

“Quite the worldly smoothie, aren’t we?”

“I am Finnish,” says Anselm, kind of chuckling. “Our tongue resembles the Hungarian language and the speech of the Sami, above the Arctic circle. I sing birds from non-existent trees. Like every Finn, I deserve to have my biography written.”

“Let’s go.”

I flip a thumbs-up to Ramona. We work with Chex Chapster, a fellow contractor for One Wow. He lurks in our apartment, eating takeout, processing video feeds, uploading data to One Wow. He’s obsessed with the stock market, and he’s always reading the Wall Street Journal. He wears a crewcut and a tie and crumpled charcoal suit. He imagines he’s retro and ironic, but there’s no quote-marks. At least he likes me, though not in a sexual way. Point of fact, Chex is gay.

One Wow pays me to party. I’m like a lure. I imagined it would be cool. Sex work is transgressive, right? No, it’s dull. At least I don’t have physical intercourse with my marks. Too grimy. They think I do, but really we’re being antennas in stumblespace. I’m ready to quit this job. Problem is, I’m hooked on stumble. I frikkin live for my sessions. I can’t go on. But I do.

Qumar is near the exit, dancing with a hologram dragon. I slip him a tip and I take Anselm outside. Turns out his “approximately a car” is, oh wow, a big sleigh with tufted leather bench seats and giant curly runners. Like something a horse would pull. It’s black.

I’m delighted. “For real?”

“Gee Willikers and I have honed a series of demos, individually and in tandem. Huffy, stumbles, the electric sleigh, and the Mean Carrot.” He slings the bagged Mean Carrot into the back seat of the sled. “The runners act as a magnetic drive.” Anselm beams at me. “My pirate streetcar. Help me shove it onto the rails, and then I flip up the pantograph.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The pantograph is the trolley pole that drinks the electricity that runs my magnetic drive and trickles into the tracks. We ride the volts, eh?”

“Won’t the real trolleys be mad?”

“In Helsinki and Copenhagen, yes, Gee and I get in trouble for my pirate sled. But so far in San Francisco nobody says boo. So loose, so rich, so high—you people. You like my sleigh.”

“Ooo.” Is Anselm the one to set me free? I raise my voice an octave. “Where’s your sack, Santa?”

“On Vixen! Push!”

The runners grate and screech as we rock the sleigh off the curb and onto the tracks of the Judah line. I hop into the comfy front seat and snuggle into a wooly blanket, like Lara in Dr. Zhivago. Anselm flips up the paradiddle or hockey stick or whatever he calls it. A gratifyingly huge spark explodes. I catch a summer-storm whiff of ozone.

Our runners hum. We rise a tiny bit into the air. I peer over the edge. Fronds of mini-sparks shower from the runners to the rails. Oh oh, here comes Ramona and her date, tumbling out of the house, with Ramona wildly laughing and tossing her bobbed hair. Her guy is all serious and and staring at us. They pile into our sled’s back seat, and we glide down Judah Street towards town.

“I’m Loftus,” says Ramona’s mark. He looks more like a bouncer or an athlete than like a tech. All kinds of poeple are here to feed off San Francisco’s tech goldrush. “What’s that stumble shit Ramona is talking about?” he asks me. He’s got a country style of speech. “I don’t want to go and lose my mind. Gonna need my mind come morning.”

“You’ll be okay by lunch time,” I tell him. “Scrape off the stumble crust when you get up. It’ll leave some tiny threads in your brain. Drink black tea, eat pickled ginger, smoke a cigarette, and the threads go away.”

“Don’t spook Loftus with stumble-bum tips,” says Ramona, always one to keep things upbeat. “All he needs to know is that we’re gonna party hardy. Right, baby?”

The city lights stream past. “I can’t hardly believe I’m riding in Anselm Saarikoski’s electric sled,” goes Loftus.

“How do you know my last name?” says Anselm. “How do you know about the sled?”

“I’m a researcher,” says Loftus, satisfied to get a reaction.. “I find things out—and people pay me. Having Anselm Saarikoski in the mix for this party—that puts the icing on the cake.”

“What’s this stupid bulky bag under my feet?” interrupts Ramona, wanting to change the subject. “It’s wriggling, ew! Can’t we ever meet normal guys, Molly?”

“That’s my bodyguard in the bag,” says Anselm. “Undo the zipper and let him out.”

So Ramona frees the Mean Carrot, and right away he crawls heavily onto her lap and reaches over to Loftus and wraps his tip around the guy’s neck and feels all over his face, tickling the man’s nostrils with nosy root hairs. Loftus doesn’t like this, and he’s yelling about it really hard, and I’m giggling like mad. For once I’m having fun.

“Down boy,” goes Anselm. “Well done.”

The Mean Carrot worms into the front seat and gets in between us. He’s ringed with wrinkles seamed with dirt. The grooves form eye slits, a nose bump, and a mouth. He doesn’t actually look all that mean. Serious and thoughtful is more like it—if a giant carrot can be thoughtful. He’s the size of a thirteen-year-old kid, with no arms or legs. On top, his ragged green leaves flutter in the chill October air. His tip twitches on the floor by our feet.

“Hey thar, Mean Carrot,” say I, elbowing him. His flesh is hard as mahogany, like it’s compressed. I’m starting to feel high—from previsualizing tonight’s stumble against my skin.

The Mean Carrot emits a thin whistle.

“No,” says Anselm, as if answering the Mean Carrot. “Molly is not a prostitute.” He turns to me. “Are you?”

“We’re lab workers,” cries Ramona from the back. “We administer tests. We’re good girls! So don’t fuck with us.” Then comes one of her wild bursts of laughter. Ramona has no internal censor.

“I’m interested in the tests,” says creepy Loftus. “I want to take them all.”

“I, for one, am awaiting mercy sex,” says Anselm. “Like a hobo who gets a cup of coffee after giving blood.”

“Stumble sex isn’t anything like what you’re used to,” I tell him. “It’s way more abstract.”

A stumble is a parasitic gene-tweaked shelf-mushroom that takes root on your head. It has smooth, slightly sticky flesh, and a short, high-speed life-cycle. It grows mycelium fibers through the pores of your skull, uses your brain as a wireless antenna, swaps gene codes with distant stumbles, puffs out fresh spores—and dies. Short but sweet. Six hours.

The Judah line swerves to the left, and we’re tooling up Market Street amid drifting crowds of revelers. It’s getting near Halloween. Some of the people point at us. I raise my palm and do a beauty-queen wave.

“I hope we’re near your flat,” says Anselm.

“Stop at Fifth Street,” I say. “We’ll walk two blocks from there.”

“Does the sled have a battery?” asks Loftus. “Can it run without rails”

Anselm glares at him. “I don’t do demos for spies.”

“Researcher,” repeats Loftus.

“Just like Ramona and Molly are lab techs,” says Anselm.

“Get out of my face,” says Loftus. “Or I’ll kick your butt.”

“A spy and a thug,” says Anselm.

“All I want is good time,” says Loftus, holding up his hands, striking a pose of a beefy innocence. “Live and let live.”

Anselm pulls the sled to a stop and we drag it into the first alley off Market Street. The Mean Carrot sounds a wavering note.

“Right,” goes Anselm. “You’ll guard the sled. And drag it over to the apartment when we need it.” He takes out his phone and wallet. The Mean Carrot opens up a crack in his side. Anselm sticks his valuables in there. He glances at Loftus. “You want to do this too?”

“I’m good,” says Loftus. “I can take care of myself.”

Fat chance. Loftus will hold his own against me, Anselm, the Mean Carrot, and Ramona? That girl’s been around. Good luck, goob.

The alley winos assess the sleigh and its great curved runners. Anselm gives them a tip, and the bleary posse settles into the cushioned seats with the Mean Carrot. The big carrot doesn’t faze them. So much crazy shit is in our lives these days. You take it as it comes.

Our apartment is on the third floor of wood frame rooming house on a grotty lane parallel to Market Street. Chex Chapster holds the lease, but it’s One Wow who pays the rent. The place really is a lab, in that we lure in subjects and test psychoactive biotech on them. These aren’t public double-blind studies; these are skunk-works runs. Some products will be withdrawn entirely, some will be distributed via the black market, and some will undertake the rigorous FDA path to legal distribution.

Before I moved in, they were testing a telepathic lung fungus called huffy. Ramona used it every day for weeks. And she came down with whooping cough. During her fits, tiny, rigid, orange nodules would fly out of her mouth and skitter across the floor. Nasty. She spent a couple of months in a clinic and One Wow gave her a fat settlement. She blew the money in Denmark, trying to get into some aristo jet-set scene. She hoped to bag a noble or a billionaire or a tech genius. She thinks maybe she met Gee Willikers at a party in a castle, but she’s not sure. She was quite high. Anyway, now she’s back to working for One Wow with me.

So here we are at the door to our apartment: Ramona, Anselm, Loftus, and me. Chex Chapster opens the door for us. He’s kind of cute in his wrinkled suit, and with the big smile he gets when he sees me.

“Let the revels begin,” says he. “Welcome to our lair, gentlefolk.”

As usual Chex is holding his Wall Street Journal, open to the stock listings, covered with the tiny hand-written annotations he makes. Talk about compulsive. Not that I’m one to point the finger.

“Are the stumbles ripe?” is the first thing I ask.

“In the Petri dishes,” goes Chex. He leads us into the kitchen.

A dozen flat glass dishes are set out on the counter, each of them with a layer of gel, each of them inhabited by two or three meaty curls of fungus. Little double-scroll shapes, glossy and leathery, with stiff, stem-like ribs on their underside. They’re grown from the very spores that Ramona and I helped hatch last night. The crazy thing about my addiction is that I use my body to grow my supply. It’s stupid. The world is loony loops.

“You ready?” I ask Anselm.

“Highly prepared,” says Anselm. “We’re in for a ride.” He presses his stumble to his temple. Fiddles with it for a minute till it settles in. Somewhere in the cloud, One Wow credits me with four hundred bucks for corralling this new test subject.

Loftus gives Chex a look, then squares his shoulders. “Me next.”

Quick to close the deal, Ramona whoops and slaps a stumble onto Loftus’s forehead, scratching his skin, but who cares. Then she fits on her own little shelf-mushroom. Her face is pert and reckless below her bangs.

“See you in stumblespace!” Ramona trills. And then her limbs go slack. Rapid onset. In full zombie mode, Anselm, Loftus and Ramona stomp into the living-room and flop down on the couches.

Meanwhile I take a minute, picking out the fattest, shiniest stumble of them all. I’m savoring my moment of maximum lust. This is the most alive I’ll feel all day.

“A word with you?” puts in Chex, doing a cold-war-spy routine.

“What.”

“A new wrinkle,” he says. “Loftus is an intelligence op.” He lays his finger along his cheek. “The nose knows.”

“Anselm guessed that,” I say. “Who does Loftus work for?”

“Ay, there’s the rub,” goes Chex. He was an English major. I was too. And look where we ended up. “It’s not so much who Loftus works for. It’s who works for him.”

“What’s your point?”

“Loftus has suborned me,” says Chex. “Crossed my palm with silver. And he, in turn, is working as a contractor for a rogue exec in One Wow. The exec thinks One Wow can achieve marketable teep this month—if they cast caution to the wind. My guy wants to bypass the FDA. Sell stumbles on the street. Via the usual deniability channels, one understands.”

“Yadda yadda,” I say. “Make sure Ramona and I are safe, okay?” I give him my best smile. “Be our hero.”

“I’m with you,” says Chex. “And…Molly?”

“What?”

“You’re too good for this job. You need to quit.”

“Not today.”

I position the damp, scratchy noodle of my stumble on the skin behind my ear. That’s the spot for the best contact. I feel a tingle, and my muscle tone fades. I truck robotically after the others and drop onto a couch. I’m so far from having sex with Anselm that I hardly notice I’m next to him. We four sit there for a long time, three of us on the one couch, and Ramona stretched out on the other. In her last moments of awareness, she managed to position herself in an alluring pose, with the back of one hand against her forehead. Like a silent movie star.

I don’t exactly see in stumblespace. But it feels like a dark summer night with blinking fireflies. Or like I’m in a sleeper car on a midnight train in a rail yard, and I know there’s other passengers in the other trains. Clickety-clack, lights moving past the window.

I love this part, blank and relaxed, riding my stumble like a princess on her bier. My flow smooth, like when you wake in the middle of the night, and there’s nothing to stress about, nothing to do but breathe.

The lights around me are are the minds of the other people on stumble trips. One Wow runs five of of these underground “test labs.” There’s at least twenty people in stumblespace with me. They’re in the Mission and Oakland and Pacifica and Santa Cruz. We’re all aware of each other, thanks to the Gee Willikers telepathogens in the stumbles.

Monetizing teep is the holy grail. The stumbles aren’t killing us, not yet—but they’re not giving us primo teep. Yes, I’m in vague contact with the other users, but the stumble network won’t transmit clear messages among the stumbles’ human hosts. The stumbles only want to use our telepathy for talking to each other about—wait for it— heterothallic fungal mating.

“Say what?” goes a jovial voice. Anselm. The dude is in my head. He’s already hacked open the stumble communication channel, and he’s using it like a phone. This guy is too much. A wildman.

“Is it thou, Hamlet?” I reply, going Shakespearean on his ass. Keep in mind that I’m quite high. I see my words as lilies on the drowned Ophelia’s breast. And, yep, that’s me there, floating supine on the glassy brook. Oh, sigh.

“What’s heterothallic?” repeats Anselm. “Two dicks?”

I regurgitate a robo-info scrap from the Stumble Users Guide, not that there is such a guide, but, spaced as I am, I can visualize it. “A thallus is an undifferentiated sprout, found on algae, fungi, lichens, and some liverworts. Also on stumbles.”

“Got it,” says Anselm. “My stumble’s thallus is a sequence of gene codes which are being broadcast by the teep of my fine mind. I resent having to perform this task. It’s like a talking mushroom paints dating ads on my back. A very poor substitute for mercy sex.”

“Well said, sir! We slave for low fungi—so they find nuptial bliss. They twine their thalli, and wrap gene pairs as spores. But, pray, good Anselm, how is it you freed our locked powers of thought-speech?”

“Stumbles scramble our signals with scuzz from a sixty-bit shift register,” says Anselm. “Took me about ten seconds to crack that. Only a fungus would use something so dumb.”

“Go to! And what news of the brutish Loftus? Canst see within his skull?”

“Aye,” says Anselm. “He’s hired Chex to squash the Loftus stumble. The liberated Loftus will rise, and kill our stumbles, and see if we get persistent teep. It won’t end well. Oh, why do you work for them, Molly? It’s not even a good high. Come away with me to the saunas! I’ll help you kick.”

“Mayhap I shall—if this eve’s alarms and affinities are as augured.”

“Whoop whoop—it begins,” goes Anselm. “Chex just now crunched Loftus’s stumble. The thug’s brain flames like a log. And, yes, he still has teep. Low, crude thoughts. Like slime under a rock. Can you see? Here he comes. And, how shitty, you and I are too high to fight back. Rag dolls. Ack!”

Something crude rams against me. My vision of stumblespace contracts to a point—and explodes in a flash. Loftus has mashed my stumble against the side of my head. A crunchy smear of pain. I toss and shudder, on the verge of a fit. No, Molly. Keep it together. I blink—and reenter the workaday world. What a zoo.

All knees and elbows, Loftus is wrestling with Anselm, trying to bind Anselm’s wrists with a twisty plastic band. Loftus has a scabby splotch on his forehead, and Anselm has a road-rash-type scrape on the side of his head.

We’re in the living room. It’s almost dawn. Ramona’s languid on the couch, still on her trip, but stirring a little, in sympathetic vibration with our frantic teep. As for Chex, he stands in the door between the kitchen and the living-room, cooing my name. “Molly, Molly! Stay away from them.”

Everyone wants to save me. Nobody asks what I want. The crushed stumble on my temple aches.

“You were supposed to defend me,” I tell Chex.

He shrugs, with a hang-dog look. “I won’t let Loftus handcuff you. The really nasty tests will be on Anselm.”

“Not if I can help it.”

I lean over the grappling pair of men and pound my elbow into the back of Loftus’s neck. It’s not nearly as brutal a beatdown as I’d like to lay on him, but, for a moment he’s still. Thanks to my teep, I feel the pain of his bruise. And I feel the flexing geometry of Anselm’s limbs as he gains his feet.

“Sweet prince,” I say to him.

“My lady,” goes Anselm. And then we kind of laugh. We’ll drop the Shakespeare thing for now.

Anselm produces a tiny silver whistle and blows it very hard. I don’t hear the sound. But thanks to my teep, I know who he’s calling. The Mean Carrot.

Just then Chex yells a warning and Loftus surges up like a breaching humpback whale. He’s intent on immobilizing Anselm—or me—with his sticky plastic handcuffs. We two take off running.

It’s like a cartoon. Loftus chases us around the living-room, down the hall to my bedroom, through my bedroom to the kitchen, across the kitchen into Ramona’s room, then back into the living-room. Just to be that much more of a prick, Loftus squashes Ramona’s stumble where she lies.

Somehow Ramona was ready for this. She leaps at Loftus, head-butting his midriff. He gasps and staggers back. Chex darts over and with a finicky, precise twitch of his well-shod foot, he knocks Loftus’s legs out from under him. He hits the floor with the back of his head—an enormous, rebounding bonk—and he’s out cold. Chex scoots back to the kitchen door and plays the innocent bystander—just in case Loftus wins.

With Loftus down, Anselm turns gleeful—he’s like a puppet-show troll, hopping up and down. He chants some kind of private nursery rhyme: “Garden gnome, garden gnome, beware the frightful garden gnome!” He says it over and over, gaily skipping about.

Me, I’m seeing shells of light around him. By the time a stumble reaches the peak of its life-cycle, it’s grown quite a thong of mycelium fibers into your skull, zillions of strands. With my stumble squashed, and me in control, I feel like I’ve got miles of info-highway in play. And I’m benefiting from it. My teep contact with my friends Ramona and Anselm—it’s giving me a new way of seeing things. Other people are real, with real feelings. Theoretically that’s obvious, but I’ve never acted that way. I need to open my heart. If I learn empathy, I might be able to kick stumble.

Meanwhile Loftus is coming back to life. And something is bumping up the stairs like a body being dragged.

“Time to go,” I tell Anselm.

“Joo.” Finnish for yes.

We head for the fire escape outside the window. The apartment’s front door splinters. Of course it’s the Mean Carrot. The tough-guy vegetable curls his pointy end beneath himself and raises his thick end like a giant’s fist. Loftus darts to safety in the kitchen.

By now Anselm and I are on the fire escape. Down below us we see Anselm’s sled. The doughty Mean Carrot dragged it here. We scurry down the fire escape steps. The Mean Carrot follows us out the window, and toboggans along after us, whistling all the way.

Loftus comes out the window, very angry. He leans over the railing and waves a pistol that’s like a fat, shiny, L-shaped candy-bar. So typical for this kind of guy.

“I need to take you to the One Wow campus for tests!” His voice is all deep and pompous and official. “Don’t make me use force.”

He’s forgotten about Ramona. Error. She rampages out the window and shoves him so hard in the back that he tumbles over the railing. He falls toward the street, thrashing and screaming the whole way.

Keep in mind that at this moment, Ramona, Anselm, Loftus, and I are in full telepathic contact with each other. Intense. Sometimes reality is gnarlier than a hallucination.

Loftus lands on the cushioned seat of the sled, which is lucky for for him, and he lands on his upper back, even better. Like a stunt-man. He’s still clutching his dick-substitute pistol. Aggro numb-nuts that he is, he imagines he can control us. I teep into the stew of greed and anger in his head.

Just then Loftus’s teep signal goes bonkers, I mean way over the top, and something very nasty begins. The mass of mycelium in Loftus's brain is generating a crop. The fungal scuzz comes cauliflowering out of his ears, vomiting out his mouth, blatting out his nostrils, and spidering around the edges of his eyes. His eyeballs glaze over, turn gray, and burst into twin clouds of spores. He keels over—off the sled and onto the pavement.

I go, “Yuk.”

Not done yet, the fungus growth goes hyper-exponential. A few seconds later Loftus’s body is an indecipherable patch of street crud. A sinewy smear of grease, like the corpse of a dog well-ripened on a country road.

“We’re fucked,” says Anselm, all gaiety gone. “Unless—Mean Carrot!”

This is where things gets good. We’re healed by the great, orange vegetable himself! Thudding and wobbling, he rushes from Anselm, to me, and then up the fire escape to Ramona. The Mean Carrot twirls his damp, bristly tip into our nostrils, down our throats, around our ears and—most important of all—he darts root hairs into the porous stumble-site wounds on our heads. And thus he expunges every infectious stumble remnant from our bods.

We three are well, and with our telepathy rubbed out. Ramona skips down the fire escape singing an aria, her arms held wide. Chex comes down into the street too. The four of us hold hands and dance in a circle—with the noble Mean Carrot at the center. Anselm leads us in chanting his line over and over and over again.

“Garden gnome, garden gnome, beware the frightful garden gnome!”

Our harmonizing voices reverberate in the narrow lane. On each cycle, we make the last word longer, deeper, and more resonant. Eventually we collapse, gasping for breath and giggling.

“To Helsinki?” I ask Anselm.

“I know a rail route that takes take us to the airport,” says he. “Help us with the sleigh one more time, Mean Carrot!”

“Can Ramona and Chex come too?” I ask.

“Why not?” goes Anselm. “I’ll find you jobs with Finn Junker. Or someplace less geeky. Helsinki is hipper than you know.”

“I’m staying here in San Francisco,” goes Chex. “This apartment is too good to give up. And I have my own friends, you know.”

“But, Chex,” I say. “One Wow is so—“

“I’ve got stock options,” he says. “I need for them to vest.”

Chex gives me a courtly peck on the chee, and he scoops Loftus’s shiny pistol from the ground. He mimes a world-weary spymaster salute and heads into our apartment building. One Wow will need to terminate the stumble project. But Chex’s job is safe. He tested the living hell out of this product.

The Mean Carrot pipes a questioning tone.

“Of course,” replies Anselm. “That will make it easier to get on the plane. Otherwise you have to ride in the luggage compartment again. Punch the Mean Carrot, Molly. Pound him like you did to Loftus’s neck.”

The Mean Carrot gets right in front of me. Standing erect on his curled tip, he reaches my shoulder. His wrinkles are bend into what’s meant to be a smile. I go ahead and thump him in the middle of what you might call his forehead. I hear something like a tiny crack.

The carrot whistles, egging me on..

“Do it!” echoes Anselm. “Like you’re beating on a door! Use both hands.”

So, okay, I wail on the Mean Carrot, drumming high and low, not letting up. The cracking noise builds—like the sound of ice breaking up on a lake. As a climax, I let him have it with my elbow. Whomp. The orange flesh splits and falls in pieces to the ground.

A wizened figure stands where the Mean Carrot had been. A shrunken, prune-wrinkled man who’s been nestled inside the intrepid vegetable all along.

“Gee!” shouts Anselm, and roars with laughter.

“Water,” says Gee, very faint and husky.

Anselm finds a hose and plays a stream over the shriveled man. He plumps up—and he has a lot of plumping-up to do. Especially his arms and legs and feet. Strange as it seems, the long bones of his arms and legs had been temporarily shorter.  In five minutes, the guy is his own right size—nearly six feet tall. He’s a pale young genius with long hair and thoughtful eyes, quite at ease amid the broken chunks of carrot.

He smiles at me. “Gee Willikers.”

I hold out my hand. “Molly.”

Ramona sashays over.

“Nice,” she says. “I think I know you, Gee?”

“You were at my friend’s house,” says the raffish man. “Near Copenhagen. The castle with the moat?  And I wanted to see you again.”

“Yes!” exclaims Ramona. “I should have stayed there. Can I move in?”

“Let’s try it,” says Gee.