Surfing Samurai Robots

by Mel Gilden

  ‘Talk, Marlowe,’ Heavenly said with all the warmth of a snake reminding a hamster it was feeding time.

  ‘First there is the matter of Slamma Jamma. When he stood up at Heavenly’s beach house — now deceased — he left an impression on the couch. It was the same set of concentric circles I saw on this very couch here the day I spoke to Sylvia Woods for the first time.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, maybe you’d have another robot of the same model kind of like wandering around your house. I’d prefer to believe that it was Slamma Jamma because that’s the simplest explanation. You’ll like this next part, Mr Daise, because it speaks well of your company.’

  ‘Make it march,’ Mr Daise commanded, barking as best he could without a barker.

  ‘You call your company Surfing Samurai Robots because your robots are built to be entirely loyal to their owners. I figure that’s true of Slamma Jamma as much as for any other SSR robot. Why would he be in this house if Heavenly wasn’t here? If Heavenly had been here, chances are good that Sylvia would have known about it. She didn’t mention it. Is it too far for you to leap that Sylvia, who looks just like Heavenly, really is Heavenly? On the other hand, why would Slamma Jamma be at the beach house guarding Sylvia, who wasn’t there?’

  ‘Circumstantial,’ Heavenly said. ‘And a cheap shot.’ ‘Maybe. But I have more evidence. For one thing, Heavenly, who is supposed to be an electronics genius, wasn’t able to jam the signals that the Surf-O-Rama contestants were using to control their ‘bots, even though Bill here had no trouble. I had to figure that was because she didn’t really want to jam them.’

  ‘And why is that, Marlowe?’ Heavenly said. ‘Because you wanted Gotterdammerung to win.’ ‘But Gotterdammerung wasn’t really controlling their ‘bots. What difference would it make whether I jammed signals or not?’

  ‘You saw what happened when Bill jammed them.’ Heavenly took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Mr Daise said, ‘Why would Heavenly care who won the Surf-O-Rama?’

  ‘Because if Gotterdammerung won, she’d get Whipper Will’s yoyogurt recipe.’

  ‘Whose what?’ Heavenly said. She didn’t like me at all, but at least I had her interest.

  I said, ‘That’s OK, Mr Daise. I like to talk. It’s this way:

  That laboratory of yours is set up like a fancy version of Whipper Will’s back room, the place where he makes his yoyogurt. There’s the refrigerator and the warm box and the clean glassware. And the place smells like the chlorine you use to keep away unwanted bacteria from growing. How am I doing so far?’

  ‘You interest me strangely.’ She walked to the sideboard and got herself a brandy. She didn’t swim in it but poured it into a whisky glass and knocked it back all at once. She panted for a moment and shook her head. ‘Please go on,’ she said, her voice strained through the liquor.

  ‘So, because of the setup, I figured you were interested in yogurt, if not yoyogurt. Maybe it even had something to do with your genetic research.’

  ‘Reaching,’ Heavenly said.

  ‘Yes? What about those horror movie plants you have growing around your house?’

  ‘I’m not the gardener,’ Heavenly said.

  ‘No, but you had to get rid of bad batches of yoyogurt somehow. Batches that were potent genetic manipulators but that didn’t do what you wanted them to do. If you were a good citizen and didn’t put it down the drain and into the public water system, maybe you just dumped the stuff out a window onto some unlucky bushes that grew a little strange from then on.’

  ‘It won’t work, Marlowe. You know yourself that Gotterdammerung was working for the gorillas. Gotterdammerung was not working for me. If they had been, they’d have said something at the surfers’ house or in the paddy wagon.’

  ‘It’s true. Tankhauser isn’t the kind of guy to keep it to himself when he knows somebody — especially somebody he thinks might be able to help him stay out of jail.’

  ‘So,’ said Heavenly, constructing her case carefully, ‘if I really was interested in yoyogurt, and I was going to get it because Gotterdammerung won the Surf-O-Rama, then Gotterdammerung would have to give it to the gorillas, and the gorillas would have to give it to me.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, walking into her trap with my eyes open.

  With a note of triumph, Heavenly said, ‘You can’t have it both ways, Marlowe. Either I hired the gorillas so I could get the yoyogurt or I didn’t. If I hired them, why didn’t they shoot me on the spot? More to the point, why would I hire somebody I knew had a grudge against me?’

  ‘My guess is that the gorillas traced you to Malibu and that they found you in Sylvia mode. You saw your chance to use them to get yoyogurt and hired them. Sylvia mode can be pretty convincing. I ought to know. If you hadn’t worn your hair like Heavenly that one time at Puffy Tootsweet’s party, you’d have come out of this without a scratch.’

  ‘But - ’ she began.

  ‘And,’ I steamrolled over her, ‘you said more than once that all gorillas looked alike to you. It’s a funny thing to say. I don’t know why you’d think there might be another set of gorillas in the world that wore suits.’

  ‘I’m not the only one doing genetic research,’ she said in a voice that came back not quite far enough from the dead.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Daise said impatiently. ‘You say Heavenly is Sylvia. She and I will talk about that. You say Heavenly hired gorillas to help her get yoyogurt. Why didn’t she buy the surf-bots herself? She could have gotten the company discount.’

  ‘You’re such a fool, Dad,’ said Heavenly as she poured another drink. ‘You know as well as I do that if you’d known I wanted to use surf-bots to get yoyogurt, you would have stopped the sale. We all know what you think of my genetic experiments.’

  I laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was sad. I said, ‘Someday, you’re going to have to climb over that wall between you — if only to see what’s on the other side.’

  Mr Daise stopped moving his feelers. Most of the brandy in his pan was gone. He spoke carefully when he said, ‘So the gorillas played all of us for suckers. They didn’t care anything about yoyogurt or about the Surf-O-Rama. They just wanted to find Heavenly.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘They had me look for her, hoping I’d do the job they couldn’t do. If I succeeded, they were all right. If I failed, they didn’t lose anything, not even my fee, because SSR was paying the bill.’

  Mr Daise said, ‘But why did the gorillas bother to hire that motorcycle gang to surf against the surfers?’

  Heavenly said, ‘Because, I suppose, surfers and motorcycle gangs are traditional enemies. At least in the old surfing movies. Motorcycle gangs surfing against surfers would look less suspicious than gorillas surfing against surfers. Look, Zoot, if Gotterdammerung had their way, they’d have beaten the surfers with tyre irons. Give me a little credit for ordering the gorillas not to hurt anybody or let anybody get hurt.’

  ‘A little credit,’ I said flatly. ‘You didn’t kill anybody or have anybody killed, except indirectly. I guess that makes you a big hero.’

  Mr Daise said, ‘She tried to fix the Surf-O-Rama. Is that so bad?’

  ‘Not so bad as some other things I could name. But if she promised not to do it again, I’d feel better. It would get me off a hook I’m on.’

  ‘I have important work to do,’ Heavenly said.

  ‘That justifies everything, I suppose.’ I stood up. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘next time either of you needs a detective, talk it over with the other and then call somebody else.’

  Mr Daise pushed his button again. Heavenly sipped her drink. Davenport came in, and Mr Daise told him to show me out.

  ‘Come on, Bill,’ I said. We beat Davenport to the front door, and I opened it myself. It was something. Not much, but something.

  I had solved the entire mystery except for one small part of it. Maybe that part didn’t matter at all to anybody except me, but that was enough. I counted. I’d worked to get the answ
er, and I would get it.

  The tables and hawkers and tourists were gone from along Pacific Coast Highway

  . The road had shed the glitter and the bangles and was itself again instead of a circus midway.

  I parked and went into the house with Bill. We walked through the house to the kitchen. There was still no glass in the windows, but that didn’t matter much on a mild night like this. Most of the surfers were out on the beach playing Frisbee by the light of torches that stuck out of the sand at angles like drunken trees.

  I found Whipper Will and Bingo in the living room sitting on the floor in front of the couch not watching something on television. A guy with a nose almost as long as mine was leaping around with a sword and talking louder than he had to.

  I sat down in a chair across from them and watched Bingo and Whipper Will paw each other.

  I said to Bill, ‘They’re a cute couple, aren’t they?’

  ‘Cuter than a greasy biscuit.’

  ‘Is the swift dialogue part of the programming too?’

  ‘Sort of. Each of us is supposed to take on the personality of our master.’

  ‘I have a lot to answer for,’ I said.

  Whipper Will and Bingo came out of their clinch, and Whipper Will said, ‘They’re still trying to decide what to do about the Surf-O-Rama. Everybody’s pretty ripped about it. If Gotterdammerung shows up on the beach again, it’ll be a pretty grotty scene. And, oh, yeah. The guy is coming tomorrow to put new glass in the windows.’

  ‘Sorry about the glass.’

  ‘It’s cool. I figure it’s part of the cost of cleaning up the beach. What’s shaking by you?’

  I told him, trying not to incriminate Heavenly Daise too much. When I was done, Bingo whistled one long low note, and Whipper Will said, ‘You’re an aggro dude, Zoot.’

  ‘Yeah. Me and your Aunt Edith. There’s just one thing I want to know. I almost got killed a couple of times defending it, and I deserve to know it. What’s so special about yoyogurt?’

  Whipper Will made mystic passes through the air and said in a stagey voice, ‘Nobody knows.’

  I didn’t laugh. I didn’t smile. I just waited, my fingers drumming on the arm of the chair. The curtains moved gently in the breeze, as if the ghosts of old surfers were passing in and out.

  Whipper Will put his hands down and sent Bingo for a brewski. He told her to take her time. She went without a glance back. When she was gone, Whipper Will said, ‘It’s true. Nobody knows.’

  ‘You fascinate me strangely,’ I said, remembered where I’d heard it, and wished I hadn’t.

  ‘A lot of yogurt is made with artificial colours and flavours and preservatives. I use the stuff from my garden. It’s entirely natural.’

  ‘That can’t be all. I’ve eaten fruit. It doesn’t have that kind of punch.’

  Whipper Will looked down and shook his head. He said, ‘For the rest of it, I really don’t know except for this: The bacterium in yoyogurt is some kind of new strain, a mutation or something, that I discovered by accident. I just culture it and let it work.’

  I thought about that for a moment, and then said, ‘What about you, Will?’

  ‘Me?’ He glanced in the direction of the kitchen. Bingo was still getting the brewski.

  ‘Yeah. You have a brain between your ears, and you even use it sometimes. What are you doing out here at the beach?’

  He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Where are you from, Zoot?’

  I smiled. Whipper Will smiled back. We were still at it when Bingo came back with two brewskis. Whipper Will took a swallow from his can and said, ‘Thanks, dude, for all your help. Philip Marlowe would be proud.’

  I thanked him and went out of the room feeling that he was right. I really had done a good job, and I knew it. I was a good enough man for this world, anyway. As for who Whipper Will was or where he came from, each of us has a right to some secrets.

  I stood for a while at the back door watching surfers throw around a plastic thing that looked a lot like the ship waiting for me under the Pacific Ocean,

  Bill came up next to me and said, ‘Lot of stars out tonight.’

  I looked up, tried to find T’toom’s sun among the pricks of light, and failed. I said, ‘Yeah.’ A moment later, I shook off my melancholy and ran out to join the surfers.