Hail Hibbler

by Ron Goulart

  “C’mon, before we sink.”

  Blushing slightly, Metz rolled up his sleeve.

  Click! Whirzzzz!

  The metal arm came free of his flesh-and-bone elbow. Using his real arm, the butler flung it to Jake. “Here you are, sir.”

  Jake caught the arm, rotated it. “Yep, here it is.” He pushed at a fingertip-size depression on the metal surface and a small compartment popped open. From that Jake shook out a selection of alternate fingers. “This one’ll work, I think.”

  Jerking out the current thumb, Jake replaced it with the new one he’d chosen. Perching on the back of the unsteady sofa, he flipped a switch on the side of the butler’s arm.

  An angry buzzing began.

  Jake thrust the thumb up into the ceiling of the pod.

  “Water’s cock-high,” announced O’Breen, jiggling where he stood. “What exactly are you doing, Pace?”

  “All Multifunk arms come supplied with spare fingers for a variety of purposes. This particular thumb happens to be a highly efficient plaz cutter.”

  “Fancy that,” muttered Metz. “Had the arm for well over two years, yet never knew that. Shows I ought to’ve read the owner’s manual much more thoroughly than I did.”

  In less than two minutes Jake succeeded in cutting a man-size exit hole in the plaz ceiling. He poked the disc out with the butler’s fist and it went skimming down the outside of the house to splash into the surrounding sea.

  Flinging the arm back to the butler, Jake said, “You lads all know how to swim?”

  “Yes, sir. Living so near the ocean I felt it—”

  “You can’t be a GLA cop unless you can swim like a frigging fish.”

  “O’Breen, I’ll boost you up onto the roof first. Then you pull Metz up and I’ll join both of you.”

  “Good enough.” The policeman joined Jake on the swaying sofa, accepted the boost and tugged himself through the circle and out. “Slippery up here.”

  “This has truly been a day for new and stimulating experiences, sir,” Metz remarked as Jake lifted him up by the armpits to the waiting policemen on the roof. “I’ve certainly never scampered out of the roof of a sinking houseboat before.”

  When both men were safely atop the slanting plaz roof, Jake leaped. He caught hold of the edge of the newly cut hole and chinned himself. Slapping out with one arm, he pulled up onto the roof.

  “You’re in pretty good shape for a civilian,” said O’Breen.

  “Yep,” agreed Jake.

  They were a mile and a half from the Malibu Sector shore; the imitation beach was a thin yellow line in the afternoon haze.

  Jake slid down the plaz dome and into the ocean. He dived, came up yards away from the sinking house and struck out for land.

  Minutes later he walked out of the surf.

  When the other two men joined him, Jake was examining the gangplank which once had led to the houseboat.

  “Very efficient,” he said, nodding. “Lazsaw job, quick and quiet.”

  Dripping, panting, O’Breen said, “Better get my ass to a pixie and phone in about this.”

  Jake held out a hand to him, palm up. “Before you do that,” he advised, “hand over the cassette you swiped from Kazee’s room.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “WHAT MIGHT THAT NOISE be?”

  “A zither.”

  “How does there happen to be a zither in the skycar cabin with you?”

  “I’m playing it, Jake.”

  “You don’t play the zither, Hildy.”

  “Decided it was time to learn.” The red-haired woman was sitting in the pilot seat, zither across her lap and long legs resting on the passenger seat.

  Speeding through the twilight, the skycar was on a preset course to CalNorth.

  “Seems to me one zither player is sufficient in any family group. Jake’s lean, weathered face showed on the pixscreen mounted in the dash. “But to business. What’d you find out at Bunnyville?”

  His wife set her zither aside, swung around in her chair and told him. “So I’m going to poke and probe around the Joyful Brothers Toy Works,” she concluded.

  “Tech Mafia allegedly owns a piece of Joyful. Be vigilant.”

  “Intend to,” Hildy said. “How was your visit to the houseboat?”

  “Stimulating,” he replied. “Even had a chance to go for a refreshing dip in the placid waters of the calm blue Pacific Ocean.”

  “How come was that?”

  “When the houseboat sank, swimming seemed to be the thing to do.”

  Hildy scowled. “These bastards really are intent on doing us in.”

  “They had in mind to knock me off along with Metz and O’Breen.”

  “Metz is the butler, but who’s the other fella?”

  “A crooked cop, GLAPD type,” answered Jake. “He was put in to go over all those damn tapes, hunting for clues.”

  “Sounds like a nice job.”

  “Not according to O’Breen. Apparently your idol of the air lanes wasn’t too inventive in the sack,” said Jake. “Upshot of the O’Breen business is the guy found something on a cassette. He swiped same, intending to sell it.”

  “To whom?”

  “O’Breen claims he hadn’t thought that far ahead, he only knew it was going to be valuable to somebody.”

  “And where’s this fabled cassette now?”

  Jake held up a black rectangular packet. “Herewith.”

  “What’s on it? I thought everything pertaining to Angel Tolliver was grabbed off by the killer.”

  “So did the killer. So did Metz.” Jake dropped the cassette off camera. Kazee labeled every cassette, kept ’em on file in his home computer system. Snag was, he had about twenty minutes of tape left on one. Due to the girl on that particular occasion’s developing an allergy to leopard skin and breaking out in a rash. She left early. Kazee, a thrifty soul, didn’t want to waste the remaining footage.”

  “It has Angel on it?”

  Jake grinned. “It does. The nose is definitely fake and they weren’t sleeping together.”

  “He was interviewing her?”

  “Right.”

  “How much did you learn from the fragment, Jake?”

  “There’s too much small talk, but I gleaned a few interesting items.”

  “Such as?”

  “Angel Tolliver would come up to the Malibu Sector from the San Diego Citistate. More specifically from Funn!”

  “Funn! is that amusement island that used to be called Coronado, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the place. Pretty certain the girl was working there.”

  “Nobody knew that until now; nobody on our side anyway.”

  “Exactly why I’m enroute there in my landcar even as we speak.”

  Hildy glanced out at the darkening sky. “I’m nearly to Carmel,” she said. “What was the other bit of information you got?”

  “Angel made a reference to someone she’d been giving Kazee facts on,” Jake said. “A chap name of Dr. Hibbler, no first name mentioned.”

  “Couldn’t be the Dr. Hibbler,” said Hildy. “Since Adolph Hibbler, the notorious Nazi scientist, perished in Berlin a week before the city fell to the Allies back in World War II. That’s over a half-century ago. Hibbler was a madman, even in that crowd.”

  “Suppose Adolph Hibbler is still alive, though?”

  “Then we’re in for a whole stewpot of trouble,” Hildy said.

  CHAPTER 9

  DUSK GAVE WAY TO night.

  Black clad, a black stocking cap covering her hair, Hildy started moving down the gently sloping hillside. Crouched low, she zigzagged through the high grass. When she reached a stand of twisted cypress trees, she halted and straightened up.

  There was a high wall of yellow brix around the Joyful Brothers Carmel Valley toy factory complex. Above the three huge tile-roofed buildings two giant light-tube figures blossomed now. Fat, jolly-looking fellows, immense smiles stretching across their cherubic faces. They glowed green, red, yell
ow, blue.

  “Ho ho ho! Hee hee hee! The jolly Joyful Brothers are we!” they sang in amplified voices which boomed through the night and the surrounding hills.

  “That doesn’t quite scan,” said Hildy.

  “Ho ho ho! Hee hee hee. …”

  The gleeful singing would continue for another two hours. Originally the floating Joyful Brothers had gone on until midnight, but legal pressure from neighboring inns and mansions had cut it down to 120 minutes per evening.

  Actually there were no Joyful Brothers any more. Roscoe Joyful had been killed in a moon-cruise accident five years earlier. Fred Joyful had passed away passed away in the Frisco Enclave Home for the Totally Goofy in 2001.

  “Ho ho ho! Hee hee hee. …”

  Hildy was wearing glasses tinted for night seeing. Stationed among the dark, gnarled trees, she watched the complex. From this height she could see over the six-foot-high walls. Thus far the guards were conforming to the patrol schedule she’d got hold of that afternoon from one of Odd Jobs, Inc.’s multitude of contacts.

  There were three guards who took care of this backside of the setup. And, from what Hildy’d been able to learn, the information she wanted was stored in the building nearest to the wall. The information hadn’t been put into the Joyful computers, so a simple siphon wasn’t going to do. She had to go right inside the place.

  She twisted, patted the skybelt strapped to her slim back. Although she was nowhere near as fond of gadgets as her husband, she relied on them when she had to.

  “Okay, we may as well roll.”

  Hildy activated the starter control on her chest

  Kachug! Kachow! Chowy chow!

  “Hey, you’re supposed to be silent,” she said to the machine.

  The motor quieted after its initial outburst.

  After waiting a few silent moments Hildy decided no one had noticed the motor’s coughing start above the laughing and singing of the Joyful Brothers.

  She checked her voxwatch, flicked the fly switch.

  Up she went, rising above the dark treetops.

  Leveling off, Hildy aimed for the spot near the rear door of the building she was interested in.

  She sailed over the brix wall at an altitude of fifty-plus feet, too high to activate the alarm screen. They didn’t get too many flying intruders hereabouts.

  The guard who covered this building was exactly where he was supposed to be, in the alley between this and the next structure.

  Hildy landed, turned off her skybelt and—

  Kathunk! Chunkachunk!

  The damn thing made a heck of a noise dying. Hildy pressed back into the shadows, as best she could with the skybelt strapped to her.

  “Ho ho ho! Hee hee hee. …”

  No one came running.

  Inhaling slowly and gratefully, she moved to the rear door of the building. A lokpik from her boot got the door open in less than a minute. She eased inside the dim-lit building. The room was crisscrossed with high plaz shelving. Stretched out on their little backs on the shelves were hundreds of golden-haired baby dolls, their white frilly dresses glowing a moonlight yellow in the pale night lights.

  Hildy lifted her glasses up, started along a corridor between two rows of dormant dolls.

  She’d gone fifteen yards when the dolls started to come to life and sit up.

  “Mama! Mama!” bleated hundreds of tiny voices. “Mama! Mama!”

  Hildy slowed, noting that each of the pudgy, two-foot high dolls was carrying a sharp little knife in her plump pink fist.

  The dolls began climbing down off their perches, coming to life, swarming to the floor and scurrying to surround Hildy.

  They stopped crying, “Mama!”

  Now, as they closed in on her, they began to chant, “Kill! Kill!”

  CHAPTER 10

  DUSK GAVE WAY TO night.

  The sky kept right on glimmering.

  Jake shaded his eyes with one sinewy hand as he slid out of his purple landcar and went walking across the neogravel to hand his keycard to the gilded parking lot ’bot.

  “You’re sure going to have f-f-f-f-f-f. …”

  Jake gave the stammering mechanism a helpful slap on its metallic back.

  “Fun!” the robot concluded.

  “I just bet I will.”

  “You needn’t worry about your vehicle, sir,” said the robot while walking to the car to settle in behind the controls. “Even though I suffer from a slight speech difficulty due to a faulty gudgeon pin, I am a whiz at handling vehicles. Indeed, my only real problem occurs whenever I try to say f-f-f-f-f-f—”

  “Fun,” supplied Jake.

  “Right you are.” The golden robot started up the landcar. “Well, see you anon, sir. Have f-f-f-f-f …”

  Jake, hands in the pockets of his recently donned two-piece funsuit, strolled out of the number 16 parking yard and hopped onto the rolling ramp which conveyed him across the water to the amusement island.

  Glowing above the island, in letters a full hundred feet high, was the word FUNN! Floating next to it was a smaller glowing ®.

  Immense quantities of light and sound were spurting up from the multi-acre amusement park. Full-size racing cars roared and crashed; full-size last-century combat planes zoomed through the air with mock machine guns chuffing away; full-size robot animals snarled, howled and trumpeted as they were felled in an acre-wide jungle; full-size ocean liners sank in scaled-down choppy seas; luxury hotels exploded; shuttlecraft flew mock flights to mock orbiting satellite colonies; clowns, midgets and chorus girls danced, giggled and tumbled. Naked fat ladies wrestled in vats of swamp mud; naked underage girls were flogged by black-hooded mock inquisitors; chimpanzees staged Hamlet; a 1930’s dirigible blew up while trying to dock; the music of every decade since the 1890’s was blaring out of its own special music hall or restaurant; full-scale trains derailed regularly.

  There were thousands of customers partaking of it all. For $25 you could, from the safety of the ground, manipulate one of the ancient war planes, try to dock a zeppelin, remote-drive a racing car at 700 MPH. For $40 you could hunt lions, tigers, bears, elephants and natives in a jungle thick with guaranteed-authentic foliage and insects. For $55 you could be either torturer or victim, depending on your inclination, in the Spanish Inquisition. For the same amount you could demolish a hotel, drive a stage coach over a cliff or wrestle an alligator. For $75 per person you could dine and dance to the music of Paul Whiteman, Artie Shaw or Bob Dylan. For only $100 you got to spend fifteen private minutes in bed with highly believable replicas of the great motion picture and television actors and actresses of the past and present. Over one hundred to pick from.

  This was FUNN!

  The girl who’d called herself Angel Tolliver had worked somewhere on this island during the last few months. Jake had already tried a tap of Funn!’s personnel computer and come up with nothing. There was no record of her having been employed under any name.

  “Let’s Dunk an Ethnic!”

  “Aw, Hazel, we can’t be seen doing that. It’d disgrace my uniform.”

  “Then let’s Kill An Endangered Species.”

  “Naw, Hazel, I can’t even do that while wearing the uni of Uncle Sam’s Substation Service.”

  “That sure didn’t stop you from schtupping Marilyn Monroe or whoever that was.”

  “I took off the uni before doing that. Besides I’m a cinema buff. The service doesn’t object to hobbies.”

  Jake edged around the bickering couple, pushed through the light-splashed, noise-dazed crowds.

  “Daddy, I want to drop down the Bottomless Pit!”

  “No, Robroy. Last time we did that you tossed your dinner all over your—”

  “But I want to drop down the Bottomless Pit!”

  Funn! was, Jake soon realized, going to be a tough place to stroll casually through. The surging crowd made casualness difficult.

  Tossed up against the counter of a shooting gallery of immense proportions, he paused to watch a s
lim, dark-haired girl shooting down African pygmies with a mock lazbazooka. The wrinkled little android natives were scurrying through a 40-foot lot full of jungle.

  The girl, who was young and pretty, was wearing a one-piece slaxsuit. She dropped every dodging pygmy she aimed at.

  “Marvelous, super!” shouted the concession operator, a small black man in a two-piece yellow funsuit and a large glaz derby. “One more little booger down and you’ll win an exciting and valuable prize, lady. How about you, bud?”

  Jake said, “Your derby’s too big.”

  “Know why I wear the topper?” He stretched to lean an elbow on the counter top. “To differentiate myself from the damn pygmies. You can get one hell of a jolt, even from one of these make-believe guns. My diminutive stature has been a thorn in my side all my life. I missed a berth on the Wyoming Rustlers Airball Squad because of being a shrimper, had to pass up dorking the brains out of a statuesque beauty pageant runner-up, lost the lead in the Stratford-Muppet production of Othello all on account of being such a little schlep. I could go on and on with—”

  “Don’t,” advised Jake, giving him one of his bleak grins. “You’ve been with Funn! for awhile?”

  “Ever since I was this high,” said the operator, giggling. “See, I can make fun of my handicap. That’s the only way to—”

  “Could be you know a friend of mine I’m trying to find. Blonde girl with an interesting nose, named Angel Tolliver.”

  The little man’s head jerked back so fast his glaz derby popped up off his head and then settled back down. He shut his tiny eyes for a full five seconds. “What was that name again?”

  “Tolliver, Angel Tolliver.”

  “Never heard of her. You sure she worked here?”

  “So she told me.”

  “Women can be unreliable. I venture to say she was shucking you, bud.”

  “Hey, mister, I just done slaughtered the required number of pygmies. Where’s my darn prize?” The dark-haired girl dropped the bazooka to the counter top, turned to face the little concession operator with hands on slim hips.

  “Coming right up, miss.”

  Jake pushed on.

  “Well, I told you you’d break a leg.”