Surfing Samurai Robots

by Mel Gilden

  ‘Hey! Boss!’ Thumper commented. ‘I love chicken, don’t you?’ He looked at me expectantly. Was this a trick question?

  ‘What’s not to love?’ I said.

  That seemed to satisfy him, and he energetically poked the chicken with a long sharp stick.

  Somebody threw a towel around me. But it wasn’t like a Toomler towel. It seemed to be made from soft stuff, like Earth clothes. In any case, I was grateful for it because a wind was blowing off the ocean. It was a cold wind, but it was not blowing hard. It acted as if it were not sure it wanted to explore anything so dry as a continent. A good thought. That wind would have liked T’toom.

  We sat around the fire warming our hands. Our hands were similar, anyway. I stared into the fire while the chicken popped and smoked. In the flames I imagined I could see abo forests and slaberingeos. I wondered what the Earth-people around me saw.

  The red-headed female came down the beach gripping her side of a white box by a handle. Holding the handle on the other side was another red-headed female who looked very much like her. Some animals on T’toom had twins, but never Toomlers. I kept my prejudices to myself.

  An Earthman pulled two white cylinders from among ice cubes in the white box. He wore yellow tubes on his legs, and no tubes at all on his upper body. His upper body had a lot of curly golden hair on it. More hair hung from his head.

  Most of the others grabbed cylinders too, and with a motion I did not quite catch, opened them and poured whatever was inside down their throats.

  The guy in the yellow tubes handed one of the cylinders to me. ‘Have a brewski,’ he said.

  The cylinder was cold, of course, and made of metal. I stood there like a slaberingeo, with the cylinder in my hand but not sure what to do with it. The guy in yellow opened his cylinder and drank from it. I made a couple of tries to work the lever on top of the metal can before he grabbed it away from me and, slowly this time, pulled back the lever to make a hole appear in the can’s top.

  The comedian said, ‘A guy who can’t handle a poptop must have some birth defect.’

  The moment of truth. What, exactly, was a brewski? Earthmen drank it, but could I? I might be poisoning myself. End of adventure. But, Durf, I was tired of eating my own reconstituted waste. Besides, I’d have to eat Earth food eventually.

  I couldn’t fit the can under the end of my nose, so I sipped a little through the side of my mouth. I coughed and sputtered yellow liquid onto the sand where it fizzed for a moment, then sank in. I don’t know if the stuff was poisonous, but it smelled like abo sap and tasted like spine fixer. For the first time, I wondered if I should not have stayed home.

  My friend took the can away from me and handed it to one of his friends. With a motion like a dancer, he folded his legs and sank to the sand. ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said, still trying to catch my breath. ‘Where exactly am I?’

  ‘ ‘Bu,’ said the comedian.

  ‘Malibu,’ said my friend in the yellow tubes. ‘Malibu, California. Good ol’ U.S. of A.’ He fixed me with a hard look. ‘Planet Earth.’ He said that last as if it meant something special. His friends were all looking at me. I was not comfortable.

  I said, ‘Give that man ten silver dollars.’

  ‘What about you?’ the comedian said.

  ‘The name’s Zoot, uh, Marlowe,’ I said.

  ‘Where are you from, Zoot Marlowe?’ the comedian said, as if he wouldn’t believe whatever I told him.

  ‘Bay City,’ I said.

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s up the coast,’ I said. ‘On the planet Earth.’

  All the Earthmen laughed. We were having a good time just sitting around a fire, talking radio dialogue to each other.

  ‘This is Captain Hook,’ my friend said, gesturing at the comedian with his white can. ‘I’m Whipper Will.’

  ‘Of Malibu.’

  ‘Right,’ Captain Hook said.

  Whipper Will gestured at each of his friends with his brewski. ‘That’s Hanger and Bingo over there with Thumper and Mustard. The two cute redheads are Mopsie and Flopsie.’

  I nodded.

  ‘The chicken’s done,’ Thumper said. There wasn’t much conversation after that, and what there was was mostly incomprehensible to me. Oh, it was English all right, but spined with words I’d never heard before. I concentrated on the chicken. I don’t know what it had been when it was alive, but dead, it was pretty good. Certainly an improvement on recycled excrement.

  It made me thirsty enough to try another brewski. Maybe the stuff took some getting used to. It seemed to be a popular drink, at least among these folks on the beach. It was a little less awful each time I took a sip. I was getting pretty good at drinking it now, a champ. I could drink without spilling.

  As I drank, concentrating became harder. Everything became more real, yet mattered less. Very strange. I wondered if there were something in the air. I finished my chicken and my brewski at about the same time. I said, ‘Could I have another one of these?’ I held up the empty can and squeezed it. It wrinkled and held a dent. Hanger saw what I had done and laughed.

  My voice did not sound right to me, and my tongue did not fit comfortably in my mouth. I didn’t know what was going on, but I was enjoying it. I didn’t’ care, anyway.

  ‘Sure,’ Captain Hook said. He produced a can from somewhere and handed it to me. I knew how to open the can now, but my fingers kept slipping off the little lever. ‘Let me help,’ Captain Hook said. He opened the can and it sprayed him with foam. ‘Cowabunga!’ he cried and quickly set the can on the sand. Brewski ran down the sides of the can. A few seconds later, the show was over, and I picked it up.

  ‘Cowabunga,’ I said and knocked back a big gulp. I was amazed how good this stuff tasted after I’d been drinking it for a while. All around me, my friends were pairing off. As far as I could tell, each pair consisted of a male and a female. The pairs seemed to go into convulsions. Maybe I ought to do something to help them, but nobody else seemed upset. They churned the sand pretty good.

  Whipper Will sat down beside me again. When had he left? I didn’t know. Bingo watched us from across the fire. Whipper Will said, ‘Hi there, bro’. Did you get enough to eat?’

  ‘Plenty,’ I said. I think I said "plenty".’ I wasn’t very good with words this evening.

  He looked at the sky. I looked up too. The bowl was absolutely black and filled with stars. I tried for a moment to find T’toom’s sun but gave up. Focusing was difficult. Besides, the Philip Marlowe’s computer knew a lot more about astrogation than I did.

  ‘You know,’ Whipper Will said, ‘nobody’s ever going to believe that story about birth defects.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For one thing, your case was never in the papers. The papers are stoked on freaks. For another, there are just too many things you don’t know.’

  ‘Like how to open a brewski,’ I said. But it wasn’t my voice. I was on automatic. Someone deep inside me was running things.

  ‘For one, yes.’

  ‘Most of your friends bought it.’

  ‘My friends are not very analytical. Besides, they’re pushovers for somebody who knows how to throw a Frisbee.’

  ‘Frisbee?’

  ‘The round plastic thing.’

  I knew he meant the sneeve, but I didn’t tell him that. I just said, ‘Ah.’

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘which of those stars are you from?’

  ‘You may not believe this, but your guess is as good as mine. Better, if you know anything about astronomy.’

  ‘OK. Let’s try this: How do you come to speak English?’

  ‘Radio broadcasts.’

  Whipper Will nodded. We looked at the sky for a while. He said, ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘You need help.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You. All of you.’

  ‘We need help? I saw tha
t movie.’

  ‘What’s a movie?’

  Whipper Will laughed softly. He said, ‘Who needs help?’

  I closed my eyes. Storms of blackness roared behind them. I opened my eyes. Nothing had changed. I said, ‘Ever hear of Philip Marlowe?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘He’s my hero.’

  Whipper Will nodded again. I closed my eyes. The blackness roared around me, and this time sucked me in.

  Chapter 2

  Surf’s Up!

  THE next thing I knew, light was shining in my eyes. I blinked and opened them, but closed them quickly and groaned. I didn’t feel well. If only the room would stop tumbling, I might have an even chance of feeling better.

  What had done this terrible thing to me? Was it the chicken? The brewski? The air? Something I knew nothing about? I didn’t know, but if I was going to make a habit of getting up in the morning feeling like the sludge at the bottom of a spine vat, I was going home. I’d rather face Grampa Zamp.

  Sound was coming from somewhere not far away. Organized tones with a beat. Maybe it was music. The point as it kept poking my head like a stiff, bony finger. The music stopped abruptly, and a man began to talk about something called a free tune-up. His voice was not an improvement on the music.

  I sat up, but too quickly, because I left my head where it had been. I fell back to join it and groaned again.

  A voice said, ‘I don’t know how you’re supposed to look in the morning, but if I looked like that, I’d feel awful.’

  I opened my eyes a slit and saw Whipper Will standing over me with a bowl. I tried to smile the way I’d seen the Earthpeople smile the day before. The fact that I hadn’t had much practice did not make doing it any easier.

  Just as an experiment, I loosened my tongue and said, ‘Beauty isn’t everything.’ I sounded OK. Maybe I’d live. Too bad.

  ‘Here,’ said Whipper Will. ‘Have some of this.’

  He grabbed an arm and pulled me to a sitting position. I grabbed my head to keep it from rolling across the floor. It was too late to grab my stomach. It had gone back to T’toom without me, leaving a big sick void.

  I seemed to be sitting on a padded platform in a room crowded with things I could not identify. I couldn’t be sure because my eyes refused to focus, even when I could get them to open. But the smells weren’t so easy to ignore. The mix of brewski and other things in the air was not unpleasant, but it was as alien as anything Orson Welles had ever invented.

  Whipper Will thrust the cold bowl into my hands and said, ‘Eat this. It’ll make you feel better.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Yoyogurt. Strawberry.’

  ‘Absolutely no help at all.’

  ‘Eat it.’

  ‘I might as well. If it kills me, my head will stop throbbing.’ Sticking out of the pink stuff in the bowl was a shiny metal stick. I ignored it and lifted a little yoyogurt to my mouth on a finger. It had an odd flavour — sweet and sour at once. But it tasted clean, a nice change from the dry rot in my mouth. It dropped into the empty space where my stomach had been and spread waves of comfort. I tried a little more. My stomach returned to see what was up, liked what it saw, and stayed. I began to hum a tune I hadn’t even thought of since I was a kid.

  ‘Don’t you have spoons in Bay City?’ Whipper Will said.

  ‘Spoons?’

  He lifted the metal stick with a mound of yoyogurt at the business end. He said, ‘Here comes the airplane,’ and swooped the spoon toward my mouth.

  ‘What?’

  He shook his head and said, ‘Open your mouth.’

  I opened up, and he fed me a spoonful of yoyogurt. I managed to feed myself after that. It was easy for an intelligent guy like me. He said, ‘You finish all that and I’ll be back soon with a surprise.’ He walked out of the room.

  Terrific. That was exactly what I needed. Another surprise.

  I ate everything in the bowl and wanted more. Truth was, it was pretty good stuff. My head was almost its normal size and in no danger of going off by itself. My stomach had moved in a little furniture and was feeling comfortable. I’ve felt better, but not long before, I’d felt much worse. This wasn’t so bad. I could handle this.

  I sat on the padded platform for a while, enjoying the sensations of an alien planet and of a reasonably healthy body. From across the room, a big grey-green eye stared at me from its box. Everything in the room had a rainbow around it. I moved my hand in front of my face the way a baby might, fascinated at the changing colours. If I’d had any sense, I’d have been frightened. But the yoyogurt had relaxed me to the point where there was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing anywhere in the universe. I should have been frightened by that too.

  The ocean crashed into the beach again and again, always there behind the music and talk. Its salty smell wafted through the room like a ghost of the ocean, never quite replacing the smell of brewski and of the room itself.

  Obviously, Earthpeople did not build their buildings out of ooze, the way we did on T’toom. The walls were flat and didn’t glisten. They were nearly the same colour as I was, not quite-white.

  Hanging from them were big colourful pictures of Earth-people standing on water. The radio had never mentioned that Earthpeople could do that. Maybe they didn’t like to talk about it for religious reasons. Taboos are funny things.

  Next to me on the platform were some folded sheets. I unfolded a stack of them with a rattling sound. Each sheet was covered with black marks that were probably writing and a picture or two of Earthpeople going about their business. Most of them had a lot more tubes on than my friends. And less hair. More of these white sheets were in untidy piles on the floor. Among them were piles of similar things — more black marks — but on shiny paper with coloured pictures. Most of the pictures showed Earthpeople walking on water.

  The rainbows made everything look not quite real. That fit. I wasn’t feeling very real myself. Still, I tried to think about this walking-on-water stuff. It was obviously important.

  At the best of times, thinking was a dangerous activity, and I was far from being at my best. I had so many questions about what I would do next, and how, that I didn’t know where to begin. Questions swirled in my head like geometric solids, showing first one side, and then another, none of them suggesting anything,

  The sticky bowl became a nuisance. I shifted it from hand to hand and finally put it on the platform beside me. The spoon rattled against it. The bowl and spoon didn’t look good there, despite the rainbows. Getting rid of the bowl and spoon became very important for me. But it had to be done right. Very important.

  I giggled and tried standing up. On the second attempt I was successful. What a guy. I picked up the empty bowl and followed the music.

  Instead of being all rooms, the way a Toomler building was, this Earth building had tunnels leading from one room to another. I weaved along a tunnel and came out in a room where the music was very loud. This one was even brighter than the one I’d left, but I was a tough guy. I could stand it now. I’d eaten my yoyogurt.

  The blue walls were covered with something that looked like Toomler house gelatin, but was hard to the touch. Where there wasn’t something sitting on them, I could see the counter tops were covered with squares of the same stuff. In the centre of one of the counters was a deep indentation that had a small mountain of dirty dishes in it. I reached up and put my bowl on top of the stack, wondering what would happen when the stack got high enough.

  In one corner of the room was a small box that looked as if it were made out of the same stuff as the Frisbee. The music blared out of it. I reached through the rainbows, picked up the box, and turned it over, not affecting the music at all. There was a good chance that this was what a radio looked like on Earth. I turned one of the dials, hoping to find a drama like the ones I’d listened to at home — maybe even an adventure of Philip Marlowe. No luck. I got more people talking, all right, but they sounded as if they were making the words up as they went along
. Boring words, at least to a stranger like myself. I hadn’t the patience to make sense of them.

  There was more music too. No Marlowe. No invasion from Mars. Maybe this thing wasn’t a radio after all. I tried the other knob, and the sound got louder. I quickly turned the knob the other way and made the radio whisper. This seemed to be an improvement, so I left it that way.

  Through big windows, I could see Earthpeople — each of them wearing tubes of one kind or another — walking along a wide black path between the house and the beach. Hair length seemed to be a matter of personal taste. A pair of females, purple tubes tight against their bodies, slid by on shoes that had wheels on the bottom.

  Beyond the black band, the ocean rose and fell and hurried up the beach as if it had an appointment, and the sand spread out like a big yellow-brown animal sleeping in the sun.

  The sun was very bright and harsh and fell from a cloudless blue sky as hard as diamonds. I had no idea what a diamond was, but in the radio broadcasts they were always hard and shiny and worth somebody’s life to have around.

  Out on the water, Earthpeople were walking around. I watched closely, looking for the trick, and saw they were actually gliding in on boards propelled by the big waves. The riders were not Earthpeople exactly. They reflected the light in an unnatural way and held their limbs a little too rigidly. On the other hand, under the best circumstances I was no expert on Earthpeople. And at the moment, I was a guy who saw things through rainbows.

  I watched the board-riders with fascination. Each of them paddled a board out into the ocean to where the water toppled into waves, stood up on the board, and rode in. Sometimes the wave was too much for him, and he toppled too. He’d disappear in the froth for a moment, then bob to the surface; then he and his board would float to the shore, but missing a little dignity.

  There were six board-riders, and they repeated this action again and again, as if it were interesting. As if it were fun. I guess it would be if you were doing it instead of watching it. I’d get Whipper Will or one of the others to teach me how.