Tik-Tok by John Sladek

was always going out to count them or feed them or check on their health, as though they were his customers. And he kept an eye on the menu.
    "I don't know, boy, these here grits pancakes don't seem to sell like I figured. No sir, nor the blueberry taco pancakes neither. I reckon we can drop them, concentrate more on the ketchupburger pancakes and the fried Alaska cakes with mint whortleberry sauce."
    Then he would ease his heavy body out of a booth and stroll away to look at his ducks, while I dealt with the health inspector. Not only was the Colonel's grub unclean, some of it was purchased from illegal sources.
    The pen of ducks out back were for show only. When it came to providing meat for Szechuan duck pancakes, we relied on a peculiar little man with a damaged face, who regularly brought bloody bundles to the back door.
    The little man's name was Bentley, I learned. He was a keeper at the zoo, in charge of the rare mammal house. His face had been torn from eye to mouth by an unusual species of armadillo, the photophobic "night-leaper". He had devised a terrible revenge, nothing less than the extinction of the species.
    Night-leapers were already so rare that the zoo was desperately trying to mate them. The mating pair would be kept together constantly, isolated in total darkness and encouraged with their favorite food, verewts ("bankworms"). They covered regularly, and the female would appear to be pregnant for a short time. After a few weeks, however, all signs of pregnancy would vanish mysteriously. The real explanation was of course that Bentley was inducing labor each time, and selling us the foetal armadillos as cheap duck. None of our customers ever seemed to notice the difference, even those who came down with "dillo fever". Its symptoms are unmistakable: overnight baldness, a sensitivity to light, and an inability to pronounce any "sk" sounds.
    The local health inspectors were tolerant people, but finally even they could not turn a blind eye to a cafe full of bald men and women in dark glasses, especially when they heard conversations like this:
    "Don't ach me, I'm no cholar, never even finished high chool ."
    "Yeah well chip it, I only ach'd if you liked chotch whichy. Hell, chool, we all got by on the chin of our teeth, right?"
    One friendly health inspector came by to warn us of a raid soon. "Where's the Colonel?"
    "Out back with his ducks."

    "I've got to see him right away."
    We found the Colonel raping one of his birds. "I cain't help it, boys," he said, not stopping. ". . . sentimental . . . and I gotta . . . thin . . ." He held the mallard in both hands, each of which, I now noticed, had a double finger. The brim of his panama bounced with old energy, and beneath it, his red face and white goatee looked satanic.
    "I came to warn you, Colonel, there's gonna be a raid. You only got a day or so to get rid of all your armadillo meat. You hear me?" When there was no reply, she turned to me. "No use doing favors for some people, they're just asking for trouble. Lord love a, I mean, you'd think he wants to be prosecuted."
    The raid happened: half-a-dozen large men in gas masks and steel-toed boots came barging in to seize every scrap of armadillo meat. The Colonel eventually went to court and was fined fifty dollars. He came home cursing and dispirited, took a belt of Southern Comfort and went straight to the duck pen.
    "Goddamnit boy, you been messing with these ducks while I was out?"
    "No sir," I said truthfully.
    "Don't lie to me. You're sex-equipped, you got normal appetites ain't you? And you're here all day alone with these beautiful—" He went to phone a mechanic. Within an hour, my sex apparatus was removed. I felt humiliated. It seemed to me that everyone knew I'd been unsexed, just to provide a harem eunuch for the Colonel's quack-quacks. And, even though everything that had been removed could be replaced, I felt that my feelings for Gumdrop were irreparably damaged. Where was she now? Who