Surfing Samurai Robots

by Mel Gilden

  Slamma Jamma stood up. Heavenly backed into him, and he closed his arms around her. She stuck her tongue between her teeth like a little girl concentrating, and her face was so white above Slamma Jamma’s mountainous arms that it seemed like a face drawn on an egg.

  Spike said, ‘It’s been a long time, honey.’ He used the kind of growl that usually comes from the back of a dark cave. ‘We’re gonna go inside now and catch up on things.’ The three walked forward, backing us into the house.

  No one was looking in our direction. Two kids who weren’t watching the surfing were mighty involved in each other. I could have shouted and attracted some attention, but I didn’t want to be clever around three not-very-bright guys with guns.

  They backed us through the kitchen and into the living room. As usual, the curtains were closed. Nobody could see us now. We stood in the centre of the room like a gaggle of penguins on an ice floe.

  Heavenly said, ‘If you guys are the same ones who crashed Puffy Tootsweet’s party. It hasn’t been a long time. Not long enough, anyway.’ Her voice was grim, and it shook a little.

  Spike said, ‘At Puffy Tootsweet’s party we shot the wrong dame by mistake. This time there ain’t no mistake.’

  Tiger chuckled and Spike told him to shut up.

  Heavenly made a jittery laugh. It was weak, and it knew it was weak. She said, ‘Is wishful thinking the only kind of thinking you guys do? I’m still not Heavenly Daise. I’m Sylvia Woods.’ She grabbed the shoulder of her bulky sweater, and with a hard yank tore it open. Under all that bulk were bandages very much like the ones Sylvia had been wearing when I’d driven her home from the emergency room.

  Spike looked at Duke. Duke shrugged. Tiger said, ‘Let’s cream her no matter who she is.’

  I said, ‘That’s what I like about you, Tiger. Once you set your mind on a thing you couldn’t lift it off with a crane.’

  ‘You both shut up,’ Spike said. In a quieter, less certain voice, he said, ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘This oughta be good,’ I said. Spike said, ‘Shut up,’ again, a little hysterically, I thought. He waved the gun in my direction.

  We were all quiet for a while. Early afternoon sun struggled to get through the heavy curtains. Dust fell. Outside, people cheered as robots rode the ocean on boards. Music came and went as people walked by with radios. Traffic grumbled on Pacific Coast Highway

  . More dust fell. We were still quiet.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Just for a minute, let’s assume that this is Sylvia Woods. Would you mind telling her why you want Heavenly Daise?’

  ‘Sure. No problem. I been turning it over in my mind for so long it’s shiny and worn from handling. I want to show it to somebody.’

  I said, ‘That’s good. Spike. I could have said that.’ ‘Yeah,’ he growled. ‘And you probably will some day.’ While Duke and Tiger kept us covered, Spike pointed the pistol at me, but for the moment it was not a pistol. It might have been his finger he shook in my face. He took a confidential tone, as if it were just him and me sitting on stools in a bar somewhere. An almost friendly voice talking about what happened at the office that day. But there was an edge to the voice that made me think of straightjackets and padded rooms. He said, ‘You know what kind of work Heavenly Daise was doing?’

  ‘Some kind of genetic manipulation, Sylvia told me.’ ‘That’s what Heavenly told us too when we answered the ad in the paper. And then she told us she was looking for a way to grow hair on bald men. Can you imagine?’

  Without waiting for me to answer, he went on. ‘Me and Duke and Tiger, we gave blood before, so we weren’t afraid of no needles. And Heavenly Daise was offering a lot more money than the blood people.’

  Heavenly’s expression was fixed. She was looking in Spike’s direction, but I couldn’t tell whether she was watching him, or looking back in time, or maybe at nothing at all.

  ‘To do what?’ I said, hoping that I hadn’t already guessed.

  ‘To manipulate our genes,’ Spike said in a voice hard enough to cut diamonds. But he wasn’t excited. He was just telling a story. He went on in the same even tone but with the air of a man coming to the punch line. ‘And you know what? She manipulated our genes so good that she not only grew hair on our heads, but all over us.’ He smiled, showing broad, flat, crooked teeth.

  ‘You mean you guys are human?’ I said.

  ‘More or less,’ Spike said. He began to laugh. Tiger saw that laughter was OK and began to do it with him. They laughed hard and a little crazy, like men who’d waited a long time to do it. Duke smiled, but his pistol never wavered.

  The laughter slowed, sounding like an engine running down. Spike and Tiger looked at each other and set themselves off again, but by that time the laughter was forced and a little stale. Heavenly hadn’t moved since Spike had begun to tell his story. She wasn’t moving now. Slamma Jamma stood near her but not touching her. Bill shuffled in place between me and Slamma Jamma.

  When Spike and Tiger stopped laughing again, I said, ‘You could have gone to the police. There are laws about experimenting on people.’

  Duke spoke now in a voice so heavy it had trouble leaving his mouth. We had to listen hard. He said, ‘We don’t want justice. We want revenge.’

  Heavenly shivered.

  ‘But this isn’t Heavenly,’ I said.

  ‘It don’t matter,’ Spike said, explaining things to the dunce. ‘We gotta kill her, just to be sure. We gotta kill all of youse ‘cause you’re witnesses.’

  ‘Sure. A day without murder is like a day without sunshine.’

  ‘Sorry, shamus. I was just beginning to like you.’ He aimed his pistol at me. Duke held tight on Heavenly. Tiger pointed at Slamma Jamma. The moment hung there like the tip of a slaberingeo’s tail at the top of its arc, just before it drops and one of its spikes nails you to the ground.

  Chapter 26

  Gorillas And Friends Of Gorillas

  HEAVENLY groaned softly. Too late I remembered my water pistol. Even later than that, I remembered that Slamma Jamma had taken it away from me and not given it back. It was probably gone with the house.

  With a single smooth motion Slamma Jamma’s chest opened down the centre on hinges and twin cannons popped from inside. They shot quickly and recoiled as they shot. The explosive noise was so loud it blew out windows in the living room and in the kitchen. Slamma Jamma continued to fire. Shells pummelled each of the gorillas, as if invisible birds were pecking them to death as they fell. The firing mechanism continued to click into the crashing silence long after the shells were gone.

  ‘You can stop now,’ I said as screams came from outside, and a hand pushed a curtain aside to let a round, serious face with a bush of dark hair look into the room and say, ‘What’s shaking?’ Far away, sirens began to wail. They got closer.

  I could hear a crowd gathering outside. More faces looked in, their number growing in a cluster, like soap bubbles. The faces didn’t mean anything to me, I sat down on a nearby chair and Bill squatted next to me. Slamma Jamma helped Heavenly to the couch. She fell back onto it stiffly. Deftly, with the calm assurance of a man buttoning his shirt, Slamma Jamma pushed the cannons back into his chest and closed the doors. He said, ‘She needs some water.’

  ‘In the kitchen,’ I said. There was nothing in my head but relief. I looked at the three dead gorillas. They were just three dead gorillas. They meant no more to me than the pile of big dirty pillows they’d fallen on.

  There was pounding on the front door and deep urgent shouts: ‘Open up! It’s the police.’ I dragged myself to my feet and went to open the door before they knocked it down. I opened the door, and three young policemen stood there, hands on holsters. One of them said, ‘We heard shooting.’

  ‘Right the first time,’ I said. ‘Come on in.’ They herded me down the hall and back into the living room. One of them immediately knelt next to the gorillas while the others looked around the room, mainly watching us.

  One of them said, ‘What we
nt on here?’

  I said, ‘Those three were going to murder us. Slamma Jamma there shot back in self-defence.’

  The officer on the floor looked as if he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him. He said, ‘These birds are dead. Good and dead by the number of holes in them.’

  ‘Birds.’ I made a short sharp laugh.

  Whipper Will ran into the room from the kitchen, followed by Captain Hook and the others. ‘Cowabunga,’ Whipper Will said as he looked around.

  ‘Who are you?’ a policeman said.

  ‘This is our hang.’ When Whipper Will saw no comprehension on the policeman’s face, he said, ‘We live here,’ as if that should have been obvious.

  The sound of angry engines drowned out the policeman’s next question, and a second later Tankhauser, still mounted on his hog of a motorcycle, rolled into the room leading his gang, also on motorcycles. Hardware, noise, and evil-smelling smoke filled the room.

  Tankhauser revved his engine and shouted over the noise, ‘Hey, look! Surf scum shot the boss!’ Then he saw the three policemen. The delighted smile that had been under construction on his face fell back into a tangled wreckage. He tried to bully his gang out of there, but there wasn’t much room to turn a motorcycle, and besides that, by this time there were more policemen at the back door.

  The police arrested everybody in the house. Except the gorillas, of course. They were past arresting, or anything else.

  A van came and took us to the Malibu police station.

  It was late, and it felt late, but it was also summer so light was just fading from the sky. I was sitting in the wooden chair that had cigarette burns on the arms, looking across an ancient green-topped desk at Sergeant Faraday. Faraday looked at me, pulled his lower lip, then ran a hand through the brush that grew from his head.

  We had all spent some time giving fingerprints and statements. Robots gave their serial numbers. If the police didn’t just stick my prints into a file, but had an expert look at them, they would get a surprise.

  I had been at the police station for a long time and was beginning to feel as if I belonged there. It was not a feeling I liked. When Faraday went into his routine again, I said, ‘If you’re doing that for my benefit, you can stop.’

  Faraday took his hand down and said, ‘I told you we’d find those gorillas, but I don’t guess I’ll shove them down your throat.’

  ‘No. Seeing as how I delivered them to you on a platter.’

  ‘Yeah. Them and fourteen other assorted geeks and gim-cracks. Plus two robots, one very expensive, the other one less so.’

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’

  Faraday blew through pursed lips, and just to keep in practice, combed his hair again. He said, ‘We got hold of the control boxes those motorcycle maniacs were using on their surf-bots. They were empty, so you were right about the ‘bots surfing under their own control. Maybe Bunco will have something to say about that. But we have them for crashing Puffy Tootsweet’s party and destroying property there. Trespassing and vandalism at the very least.’

  ‘My guess is that they are not new at crashing and destroying.’

  ‘You’re a genius, Marlowe.’

  ‘Yeah. Anything in the fact that they admitted in the presence of three police officers that they worked for the gorillas?’

  ‘Look, Marlowe, we don’t think a whole hell of a lot of those creeps ourselves. But we gotta check on things before we hang somebody. They’ll get the same breaks as anybody else. Got that?’

  ‘Good enough. What about the big robot that shot the gorillas?’

  ‘Self-defence. Or defence of his owner, anyway. And the rest of them are just surfers who happened to live in the house. Surfing isn’t a criminal offence yet. A couple of them have outstanding parking tickets.’ Faraday shrugged. Then he looked at me with his eyebrows up. ‘Anything else you’d care to tell us about those gorillas?’

  ‘They were looking for Heavenly Daise, and they found her.’

  ‘Looking why?’

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I guess not. Not for the files, anyway.’

  I stood up and said, ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Where are you from, Marlowe?’

  I smiled and walked out. A police car had already taken the surfers home. In the lobby I met Heavenly, Bill, and Slamma Jamma. Heavenly said, ‘I spoke to my father. He wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘That’ll make it easier for me to talk to him.’

  One of the three young policemen who’d been at the scene of the shooting drove us back to the surf house. He kept looking at us, but he didn’t say anything. None of us did. When he dropped us off, he wished us luck and drove away.

  We got into my car, and I took us to Hollywood.

  Chapter 27

  One Aggro Dude

  WE did not speak much during the ride, each of us having his own thoughts. The air was warm and soft, and it made the world seem warm and soft too.

  I drifted along with the traffic, trying to stay out of trouble. Only cars behind the Chevy seemed to be in much of a hurry. They kept swinging around me angrily, getting in front of me, and then deciding they had some time to rubberneck after all. I loved California drivers who wanted to prove in their own dangerous way that I was a terrific driver.

  When we got to the Daise mansion it was nearly dark, and the place seemed wrapped in grey flannel. Nobody had to push the buzzer at the gate. It opened as we approached. We were expected.

  I pulled up next to the big car that Heavenly never drove. We walked to the door, and Davenport let us in. He welcomed Heavenly home and said, ‘Good evening’ to me. Slamma Jamma and Bill were so much dead weight to him. They got all the respect due a piece of luggage.

  Davenport hurried to the library where I’d first met Sylvia Woods and opened the door for us. We went in, and he closed the door gently behind us. We stood in the middle of the room in a small confused clump. Heavenly said, ‘That Davenport needs a good cleaning. My father isn’t in here.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said a voice. It was the scratchy nightmare voice. Only it was too familiar to give me bad dreams now. I looked in the direction of the voice and saw a shallow stainless steel pan on a desk. In the pan was Mr Knighten Daise, still looking a lot like a lobster.

  Heavenly took a step forward and craned her neck at the lobster as if she were looking over a wall. ‘Dad?’ she said in a very uncertain voice.

  ‘Who else would it be?’ he said.

  She looked at me as if I would know and said, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ the lobster said and laughed like corduroy trousers laughing.

  ‘It is a joke,’ Heavenly said and crossed her arms. She sat down on the long leather couch. Slamma Jamma moved in to stand behind her. When he stood still like that, his face impassive, he looked like the piece of machinery he was.

  ‘No joke, cutes,’ Mr Daise said. Coming from a lobster, it sounded obscene. He went on, ‘I have a lot of enemies. Even more than you have, and evidently you have plenty. I needed to disappear. But there was work to do, and I couldn’t really go away. So I had my brain put into this lobster body. You might want to do the same. I’ll give you the number of my surgeon.’

  Heavenly shuddered and said, ‘Keep it.’

  The room was silent but for the ticking of the clock. Mr Daise said, ‘Can I get any of you a brandy?’

  Heavenly looked away. Bill opened his mouth to say something but squatted next to me and said nothing. I said, ‘No thanks, Mr Daise. I was told you wanted to see me.’

  ‘Can’t we be civilized about this?’ Mr Daise said. He reached a foot out of the pan and touched one of a rack of buttons. A moment later, Davenport entered the room. Mr Daise said, ‘Brandy.’ Davenport took a square bottle from a sideboard and carefully poured brown fluid into the metal pan. Mr Daise wriggled in the brown fluid and made lip-smacking sounds. I don’t know how he did that without lips. Davenp
ort put the bottle away, then went out and closed the door.

  Mr Daise said, ‘It seems you were correct about those gorillas, Mr Marlowe. If it hadn’t been for Slamma Jamma, they would have killed Heavenly. What I want to know is why they wanted her dead.’

  ‘Ask Heavenly.’

  Heavenly turned toward the bookshelf as if one of the books had called her name.

  ‘I’m asking you, Marlowe. You’re the detective. Report.’

  ‘You hired me to find your daughter, Mr Daise. There she is, and not damaged much. But I’ll tell you anyway because you’ll need to know.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Those gorillas wanted to see Heavenly dead because of a genetic experiment she did on them. They were a little upset that they were men she’d made into monkeys, and they wanted their revenge.’

  Mr Daise waved his feelers in Heavenly’s direction and said, ‘I told you that genetics stuff would get you into trouble.’

  ‘The family business bores me,’ Heavenly said without looking at the lobster.

  ‘Kids,’ Mr Daise said as he beat the brandy with his legs. He didn’t stop when he said, ‘OK. We know the gorillas asked me to hire you to distract you from finding out what happened to all the surf-bots. And incidentally to really find Heavenly. Was there anything for them in the surf-bot angle?’

  ‘As it turns out, that has a lot to do with Heavenly too.’

  Heavenly turned slowly to look at me. She didn’t like me so much now. I had the feeling that she would like me less as time went on.

  I said, ‘It’s kind of complicated, but I’ll start with this. Sylvia Woods and Heavenly Daise are the same woman.’

  ‘A lot of people make that mistake,’ Mr Daise said.

  ‘No mistake. For one thing, there is that little matter of Heavenly’s injured arm. Very much like the injury Sylvia got from the gorillas at Puffy Tootsweet’s party.’

  Heavenly nodded and said, ‘Dumb luck.’

  ‘Oh, that was just the clincher,’ I said. ‘I could have guessed that you and Sylvia were the same woman even without dumb luck.’