The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt Page B

monsters. He did as he was told.
    The trick is, of course, to attack strengths, not weaknesses.
    Emily popped the lid off the aerosol spray and lifted it. The hydra was holding perfectly still, waiting for her to come within striking range. Mythical or not, it was a snake, capable of moving blindingly fast, inherently practical enough not to waste its energy on a non-viable target. Stay six feet away and you’re safe. Five feet, and you’re a paragraph in the obituaries column in the trade paper.
    Calmly, because hydras are very good indeed at picking up on fear, Emily shook the can. The rattle of the little ball-bearing was disconcertingly loud in the dead silence.
    Only a mug tries to deal with an enemy that has an average of seventy self-replicating heads by pruning it. A sensible and experienced person, a professional, takes the view that seventy heads means a hundred and forty eyes, and that her best friend is therefore her spray-can of Mace.
    ‘I suggest you shut your eyes,’ Emily told the sacrifice. She couldn’t look round to see if he’d obeyed, because of the need to maintain eye contact with the hydra. (Try it sometime, by the way: a ratio of seventy to one. Keep it up for more than ten seconds and you’ll completely redefine your concept of headaches.) Very gradually she lifted the can until the nozzle was level with the approximate centre of the thicket of heads.
    Schedule D to Section 34 (a) of the Endangered Monsters (Conservation) Order 1998 requires that once a hydra has been blinded with an approved spray (as defined in Schedule D part 2, paragraph (D) (iv) (3)), it’s the responsibility of the licensed control practitioner to immobilise it as quickly as possible with a permitted tranquilliser administered by injection or intravenous drip. The hydra should then be removed within two hours (three hours in Wales, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man) to a holding pen constructed in accordance with the specifications set out in Schedule E part 6, to await relocation to a designated hydra reserve. The only exception provided for in the regulations is bona fide scientific or medical research; in which case, it’s permitted to pump 20cc’s of liquid SlayMore into it and hide behind a pillar until it’s stopped thrashing about.
    The pest-control department of Carringtons is on record as being engaged in a long-term research project into hydra toxicology. Their aim is to find out how much SlayMore it takes to kill the buggers and, as far as they’re concerned, if you want to end up with good science there’s no such thing as too much data.
    ‘It’s all right,’ Emily said, peering round the edge of the pillar. ‘You can open your eyes now.’
    ‘Is it—’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh.’
    It wasn’t fair, she told herself, to expect ordinary normal people to be brave. There’s a good reason why fear is included in the package of software bundled with every new human being, and a world full of heroes simply wouldn’t function. Even so. It’d be nice, one of these days, to meet a civilian who didn’t faint or freeze or wet himself while she was in action. For one thing, it’d imply that he trusted her to do her job. Somehow, she couldn’t help thinking it’d be different if it had been Ricky Wurmtoter or Kurt Lundkvist or Christian Macdonald wielding the Mace can and the big syringe. That said, there was no call to go taking out her sense of general grievance on the public.
    ‘It’s all right,’ she said, in her best approximation to a calm, soothing voice. ‘I know it was scary and horrid, but it’s all over now and for crying out loud stop that ridiculous snivelling.’
    (For the record, Emily’d had seven boyfriends, none of them for long. The most recent had been a six-foot-eight rugby international. She hadn’t been particularly surprised to discover that he was terrified of spiders in the bath.)
    She rang Mr O’Leary.
    ‘All done,’ she said crisply. ‘Clean-up’ll be along in about