“Uh… actually, Lyle, I feel I should save my super strength for my fight against evil.”
“Oh. I see. Well then… I told you you couldn’t eat those.”
“Oh, okay.”
“They’re wax.”
“Fine.”
When the interview was over, the Mayor said he thought that was enough public appearances for me for one day. I was glad. I wasn’t looking forward to that three hour concert at the stadium anyway. As we were leaving, he said the next time I was asked how I got my super powers, I should just say I got them by voting for him. I said I would.
Now, you would think, wouldn’t you, that a super hero could sleep in as long as he wanted in the morning. A guy like that should be able to make his own hours, I would have thought. I was informed that this was not so late the next morning. I was awakened by a loud banging on my door at around eleven o’clock.
When I opened the door I found the Police Commissioner and Mayor Safeton standing on my doorstep, pointing at their watches.
A half hour later I was in costume, standing on a street corner, yawning, and keeping a bleary eye out for crime.
I quickly attracted a lot of attention. Everyone stopped to gawk at my costume and check out my superness for themselves. They felt my muscles, punched me experimentally in the stomach, jabbed me in the side with pen knives, and so on. I had anticipated this, so I was wearing a great many extra pairs of underwear under my costume. This not only cut down on the pain, it also made me look stronger than I really am.
Some of the people in the crowd wanted to see me demonstrate my super human strength for them by wrecking something. Fortunately, wrecking stuff doesn’t require super powers. Not if you’re clumsy enough. I could wreck things Superman would have had trouble with. It’s genetic, I guess. My grandfather wrecked North Dakota without doing anything. Honestly. He was just standing there.
So I ripped mirrors off of parked cars, knocked over stop signs just by leaning on them, derailed a trolley, even broke a guy’s leg. The crowd was amazed. I was kind of amazed too. I’m always amazed when I destroy something without any effort. It just shows what you can do if you’re not balanced properly.
Little kids were fascinated by me. They were always coming up to me wanting me to crush things for them - their homework or their little sister - or to sign autographs for them. I did whatever crushing they wanted done, but I told them the autographs would cost them $150 each. I was a big-shot now, I informed them. The value of my signature had gone up. And the expense would have to be passed onto them, the nation’s kids. Otherwise the economy wouldn’t work. The ones who already had my autograph were pleased about this. The value of their collections had just gone through the roof. The rest of them thought it was bullshit, though they couldn’t say so until they were older.
But I didn’t get to stand around looking pretty all day. There was work to be done, the Mayor informed me. He said I wasn’t just there to protect the city from super villains. $1,500 bought more than that, even these days. I was there to protect the city period. He said I should re-read my contract if there was any confusion about this. I was getting kind of bored just standing around anyway, so I started patrolling the city - crashing into small time crooks, sliding sideways through gambling dens and auction houses, getting dead cats down from trees, changing street lights that had burned out, and so on.
The police liked this new arrangement since it gave them more time to relax. Pretty soon the only place you could find a policeman was on the lawn chairs set up outside of the police station. All the actual crime busting was left up to me.
Since I had so much to do, the Mayor decided I should have a sidekick, so he assigned one of his younger staff members, a wise-cracking go-getter named Smitty to me. But I had to spend too much time saying: “Quiet, Smitty.” So I finally fired him.
I wasn’t very good at being a super hero at first. I know it sounds easy, and the comic books make it look easy, but it’s not. I didn’t know how to do a lot of the things super heroes are supposed to know how to do.
You’re expected to stand there and let bullets bounce off your chest, for example. This is hard to do. All my extra pairs of underwear I was wearing helped, and some of the bullets did, in fact, bounce off. But most of them didn’t. I was usually up half the night picking bullet-heads out of my chest with tweezers. I was also expected to dodge the empty guns that were thrown at my head after all the bullets had been fired. That wasn’t easy either. Some of those criminals have good arms.
The Mayor liked seeing the bullets bounce off me. That proved that I was for real. He even took a few shots at me himself to show how I worked to some of his buddies from City Hall. Once again, the empty gun nearly took my head off. But I didn’t mind. You’ve got to keep the boss happy, if you want to keep those big paychecks coming in.
Another thing I was expected to be able to do was to crash through walls and bang people’s heads together. I couldn’t even get all the way through most of those walls. Usually a fire-truck would have to come and get me out. And almost every time I banged two heads together, one of them turned out to be mine, and the other turned out to be the Mayor’s. I’ve got to work on that. There must be some trick to it.
Still, I managed to do a fairly decent job as Central City’s resident super hero, mostly due to the fearsome reputation the newspapers had given me. I’d streak out of the sky or skid along the sidewalk on my belly towards the scene of a crime and more often than not the criminals would take off before I’d even arrived. So I managed to keep the peace without doing too much actual fighting.
As the days passed, I became a familiar sight on the streets of Central City. And, of course, familiarity breeds contempt. At least, everyone who is familiar with me is pretty contemptuous. The citizens began losing a little of their awe of me. That’s when the complaints started.
They complained that I didn’t act the way super heroes were expected to act. They pointed out, for example, that I didn’t keep my true identity secret. I didn’t keep changing from one persona to the other all the time. I didn’t understand the point of constantly changing back and forth from mild mannered Frank Burly to bad mannered Flying Detective all day long. I mean, what’s the damned point? So I wore my costume everywhere I went. People would give me strange looks when I was sitting in a coffee shop, with my jet pack on idle, having some eggs. They seemed to think I should go back home and change just to have lunch. Screw that.
Since my identity wasn’t a secret, people around me became targets. Criminals seemed to think they could stop my interference in their affairs by kidnapping my friends. I told them they weren’t very close friends anyway, just kill them. They called my bluff and killed one, but I didn’t care, so they let the rest go. I didn’t care about that either.
Each day there were more complaints about the way I did my job. People were focusing more on my failures than on my successes now. They complained about the innocent people I had hurt, the stolen money that was found in my costume, and that little crippled girl I was supposed to take on a goodwill flight around the world. Hey, I forget where I dropped her, okay?
Still, despite all the complaints, the citizens of Central City had to admit I was doing my main job, which was to stop the raids on the industrial district. There hadn’t been a raid since I started.
Then the super villain Napoleon struck again, damn him. Another major raid was launched on the city. The biggest one so far.
The Mayor was delighted. Now the city would get some real value for its money. He shined the Flying Detective Signal up in the sky and happily waited for me to come stop the raid, as per our agreement
He had to wait awhile.
When I saw the signal in the sky, I admit I hesitated. While I was more than happy to accept $1,500 a week to protect the city, I was kind of hoping that I wouldn’t really have to.
The city thought of me as their insurance policy, and that’s kind of the way I looked at it too. I was there to g
ive them a feeling of security – and you can’t put a price on that feeling – and then when the time came to pay off, I would find a way to weasel out of it, just like an insurance company. The last thing I wanted to do was to actually try to capture an army of inhuman monsters, commanded by some nut case who thought he was Napoleon. A guy could get hurt doing stuff like that.
But now that the time had come, I couldn’t think of a single way to weasel out of my obligations. I guess that’s why insurance companies get the big bucks. They can think on their feet. I can’t.
As I watched the smiling outline of me flashing insistently in the sky, I realized I was in a bind. If I didn’t at least make a token appearance during this crisis, I could pretty much kiss my $1,500 a week goodbye. That, I decided, was out of the question. So I climbed out from under my bed, fired up my jet pack and soared out over the city, heading for the industrial district.
A great cheer went up when I arrived at the scene of the raid. The streets were lined with people happily waving pennants with my name on them, and holding up their children so they could see me in action and watch the guts fly.
I took one look at the size of the army I was expected to kick the living shit out of, and realized I had no chance. There were at least two thousand of the mechanical creatures looting the buildings, and another five hundred or so standing guard. Those guards were now looking my way, and beginning to advance towards me.
There was only one thing to do, and I did it. Suddenly roaring back up into the sky, with a hearty “Up, Down, and Away!” I flew off to save myself, leaving the city to its fate.
CHAPTER FOUR
Twenty minutes later, the Mayor and Commissioner Brenner were walking the streets looking for me. They were, apparently, determined to get their money’s worth out of me. When they got to a line of dumpsters near my office, they started looking in those. Why do people always look for me in garbage cans? I mean, how do they know?
They opened the first dumpster in the line and immediately the last dumpster blasted open and The Flying Detective roared out and spun through the sky.
By the time I could orient myself, I found that I was spinning back towards the industrial district. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like any of this. I had been hoping that I could just lay low in a nice garbage can somewhere until this whole thing blew over, then show up for work tomorrow morning and play dumb about the whole thing. What robbery? What cowardice? Where’s my check? That sort of thing.
Once I managed to straighten myself out in the sky, I looked down and saw that I was right over the scene of the robbery, which was still in progress. And I saw that the creatures down there had seen me. That didn’t alarm me too much. There was no way I was going to go down to where they were. They could stand there until they were fifty and we still wouldn’t be any closer to each other. Then I saw about twenty of the newer shinier looking creatures suddenly roar up into the sky, jet exhaust coming out of their rear ends. Obviously something new had been added. Something I didn’t like one bit.
I frantically tried to turn in about five directions at once, and somehow managed to throw something out of whack on my jet pack. Suddenly I didn’t have any control over the machine at all. I began making high speed figure eights in the sky, along with barrel rolls, wing-overs, reverse Cuban eights, corkscrew rolls, outside loops, stall turns, and flat spins. You name a way of being out of control in an aircraft and I performed that maneuver. At one point I was actually hopping across the sky like a grasshopper. I looked like the greatest trick flyer in the world.
The creatures tried to stay with me, doing their best to match me harebrained stunt for harebrained stunt, all the while firing some kind of laser beams at me from their eyes. But their obviously superior equipment and flying skills were no match for my accidental acrobatics.
One by one my pursuers came to grief. They would be corkscrewing right behind me as I went between two buildings, and when I came out, after performing four high speed right turns and an Immelman, I was alone. Every time one of them got on my tail, I would end up miraculously surviving and he would end up with his picture on the wall of some bar in the high desert.
Within ten minutes, I was alone in the sky, clinging to the ledge of the Central City Bank Building, my jet pack roaring, with no way to get down. All of my directional controls were gone now. It’s like the whole machine was stuck in neutral.
I clung to the ledge, calmly running through a mental checklist of all of the things I… then lost my grip mid-list and plummeted to the ground, my jet pack still going full blast. I hit the street and exploded, taking out one of the robbers’ getaway trucks and scattering unconscious creatures in all directions.
I was hurt, but not as hurt as I would have been if I wasn’t used to it. As I slowly got to my feet, people rushed up to congratulate me. Never had any of them seen flying like that before. And, though I hadn’t foiled the entire robbery, I had at least stopped one of the trucks. And I had killed or captured twenty nine of the creatures. I was the hero of the day.
I went triumphantly along to the police station with my captured robbers, giving them a little push when I felt they weren’t moving fast enough, and accepting congratulations from all sides for the great job I did, and for being such a helluva guy.
The police had problems booking my captives because, for one thing, they didn’t have any fingerprints. And their faces were all the same. How do you book guys like that? How do you arrange them in a line-up? Modern police methods require different faces. The police thought everybody knew that. These robbers made them mad.
The creatures didn’t have hearts or other internal organs either. What they did have was a variety of propulsion mechanisms – electric motors, clockwork, steam power, storage batteries and so on. They were also equipped with built-in radio control receivers and rudimentary mechanical brains. I asked the police if they always cut open people they arrested like this, and they asked if this was off the record, and I said it wasn’t, so they didn’t say any more.
I tagged along as my prisoners were taken down to the holding cells. On the way, I noticed they were all wearing neat shiny black rings on their fingers. I asked about these rings. What did they signify? One of them cleared his mechanical throat and said in a mechanical voice that the rings had to do with a club they were all in. I asked if I could join this club, because it sounded like fun, and sometimes I get lonely, but he said no.
Everyone was delighted by my heroic defense of the city - Mayor Safeton most of all. This was exactly what he had hoped would happen when he had hired me. This was the kind of thing that gets politicians votes they don’t deserve. He asked an aide if there was any chance they could get the election moved up to tomorrow. The aide said he’d look into it.
I was asked to make dozens of public appearances and speeches over the next few weeks. I was glad to do this because it made me feel like a big-shot, and there’s no better feeling than that, scientists say, but unfortunately, I still wasn’t very good at making speeches.
My first speech was in front of a women’s group - The Pompous Asses For Values - and it didn’t go over too well. My speech was too brief, for one thing, lasting only a couple of minutes before I ran out of material and started to stare. And the question and answer session afterwards got kind of dicey.
“What moral message do you feel you are sending to the youth of this city?” asked a pompous ass in the third row.
I scratched my head. “Shit, lady, I dunno.”
Everyone got all upset when I said this. I looked around at all the aged angry faces. “What the shit is the problem now?”
Instead of answering me, they just got more upset. I felt I was losing control of the situation. I made an excuse and left early. “I’ve got to take a shit,” I told them.
After a few more speeches – to groups as varied as The Pompous Asses For Freedom, their great rivals The Pompous Asses For Liberty, The Pompous Asses For Progress, and The Pompous Asses For Change - I star
ted to get the hang of public speaking. I learned not to say anything except what they wanted to hear, like how important their group was, and how right they were about everything. I learned to make long speeches instead of short ones, so there wouldn’t be time for questions afterwards. And I learned not to say “shit” so much. Or so loud.
While I was making all these appearances, there were four more robbery attempts on Central City’s industrial district by the “Napoleon of Crime,” as the papers had cleverly begun to call him, and I’m proud to say I partially foiled them all. Twice I fell out of the sky onto some of the raiders when I was trying to leave town carrying too heavy of a suitcase. Once I blew up when I was approaching them with a flag of truce and the plans for a nearby fort. And once my jet exhaust caused a fire that burned down the part of the city they were attempting to rob. They had to just turn around and go back where they came from, empty-handed. All of these skirmishes were considered great victories by the people of Central City. They were glad to be able to cheer about anything at this point.
I was enjoying my new found celebrity, and my bank account was bulging with all the speaking fees I had been getting, not to mention my hefty weekly salary. And the value of my autograph had gone up to $180 now. I thought my life couldn’t get any better. Unfortunately, I was right. My life suddenly got much worse.
I had just gotten home one night after serving as Grand Marshal of the Pompous Ass Parade, when there was a metallic knock on my door. When I answered it, I found a creature standing there with a note. The note was unsigned, but the writer said that if I kept meddling in his affairs, and didn’t drop the whole Flying Detective thing right now, the next raid wouldn’t be against Central City. It would be against me. The last five pages of the note were just graphic descriptions of what was going to happen to me if I didn’t heed this warning. It wasn’t pleasant reading. It almost made me sick.
The Exploding Detective Page 3