Lee Marvin and the Long Night

by Nick Cole

  “You realize now what this gun is, don’t you?” Norton Morris was in charge. If anyone was asking questions that didn’t need answers, it was him. “Maybe you don’t, maybe you do. But now you know what the gaping void of eternity looks like when you’re staring at the business end of it. And when we get where we’re going, you’ll meet Dupree’s girl and you’ll shake hands. That’s all.”

  I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that there didn’t seem to be much of a plan after the handshake. I probably wouldn’t have liked it anyway.

  In the dark, out past the big windows that overlooked the runway beyond, an engine started. Then another. And after that the other two. Our plane. I lit a cigarette and wondered what the real Lee Marvin would do.

  After takeoff, I slumped back into my seat, pushed my hat down over my head and tried to feign sleep. In the back, mail sacks piled to the ceiling absorbed the sound of the four huge Douglas engines, giving them a dull throbbing sound. Up front, the pilot, a leather jacket flyboy with a day’s worth of growth on his mug, nodded calmly as Morris held out a scrap of paper. Longitude and latitude was my guess. In his other hand he held my gun.

  My only possible ally was a high jacked pilot who might be a rummy judging from the stubble. I didn’t like my gun being used in a manner I didn’t care for, but who does? And as for Henry, regally seated next to me, at home in his crown, his tights, and his long coat? Beneath the royal facade, he was a brute of a man who could probably beat a peasant like me to death. I wondered where he kept his turkey leg. He didn’t seem overly upset by the aircraft or the altitude; maybe the Châteaubriand and mashed potatoes had lured him into sleepy complacency.

  An hour later the plane began to descend. I moved to the open curtain and watched Morris peering intently ahead. Below, in the shapeless darkness of the Pacific Ocean, two lines of parallel lights guttered and flickered. Torches.

  Morris noticed me and waved the gun too causally in my direction. “Get buckled in. And tell Henry to also. You might have to show that idiot how.” I did. Minutes later, the plane jounced its way onto the dirt and began to taxi. I closed my eyes.

  I knew that in the next few minutes I’d have to do something I didn’t want to. Like shake hands with Dupree’s girl. But that didn’t make sense. She was just some skirt – redhead, blue eyes, tight sweater, but a dame nonetheless. What was so important about her? But deep down, I knew I had to do anything but shake her hand. Even if it meant taking a bullet from my own gun. And I knew if it came to that, there wouldn’t be any heroic Saturday matinee shoulder wound. Nothing of that sort. It would be a new word; a secretary’s word. A secretary who takes shorthand for the big boss who grabs her butt and likes to play tickle in places off the map. Deleted.

  The pilot chopped the engines, and in the silence I could smell the stale cloth of my seat, hear Harry’s labored breathing, and see the pilot with Morris behind him, gun at his back, heading towards the door.

  It wasn’t the smartest plan in the book. I bet Phil Marlowe would have done something better, but like I said, I’m not the best, so I kicked the pilot in the stomach and sent him flying back into Morris.

  A second later, as Morris cursed and Henry the Eighth tugged at his seat belt, unused to restraint of any kind, I grabbed for the handle and pushed outwards on the big door. It didn’t move. A pin, gleaming dull and silvery in the light of the cabin, laughed at me from the deck. I pulled it, yanked the lever and pushed outwards. It opened to guttering torches and a dark jungle.

  I lowered myself to the ground and ran. Norton Morris yelled but didn’t fire. Ahead I could see Dupree’s girl, a gray skirt over thighs I remembered to be silky in the moonlight of a cheap motel. A green sweater filled nicely and auburn hair that seemed like pumping blood in the flickering light of the torches. And those silvery eyes…now turned blue. I could grab her and we’d make for the jungle. She was only twenty feet away, and we’d get a good head start. After that, who knew?

  “I’ll shoot her, Mr. Marvin.” Morris screamed from the doorway. “I’ll shoot her dead before you can even get to her. And she’ll be gone. You know it and I know it.”

  I stopped, panting. Norton Morris stood triumphantly in the open door of the fuselage. For once the little shoe clerk held all the cards.

  A few minutes later we were all together, facing Dupree’s girl. Henry the Eighth guffawed with laugher. “Good shew Norton. I suspect thou mayest indeed be an Earl before this evening’s out.”

  “Shut up, Henry. Now, Mr. Marvin. Shake hands with her.”

  She didn’t say anything. But the look in her blue eyes told me to do anything but what Norton Morris wanted me to do.

  “Before I do Norton, tell me one thing.” If I couldn’t shoot off my gun, why not my mouth? “Why Henry? You’re obviously in charge. Why him?”

  “Shut up and shake stupid, before I drill you.”

  “If you do, then I guess I can’t shake with bright eyes.”

  “There are other ways,” he whispered through clenched teeth.

  For a long moment the gun remained steady. But the eyes behind it were livid with rage.

  “Do it!” screamed Morris.

  “No. You do it!” I shot back.

  “He can’t do it! He can’t do it because…” It was Dupree’s girl. Her blue eyes had turned to silver. “Because he’s dead Mr. Marvin.”

  Morris trembled with silent red rage.

  “And yet here I am, holding this gun.” He began quietly. “Your gun. What do you have to say to that Mr. Marvin?”

  When you don’t have the answers, shut up. Let other people do the talking, especially when the ones holding the guns aren’t going to like what you have to say.

  “You’re still dead, Norton Morris.” Dupree’s girl’s voice, a hint of quivering fear, was steady for the most part. “You died in that shoe store. It’s not your fault. Mr. Richter tortured you for what probably seemed an eternity in your mind. And then you slipped through the cracks…”

  “Yes, I did,” he mumbled softly.

  “And went mad,” she finished. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. I’ve flown the entire length of the spiral arm, Mr. Morris. I’m one of the few captains who have. But never in all my years, did I ever think an A.I. would go mad.” Her silver eyes stared into Morris. “And yet you did. Just like Richter did. And now you want to kill all the sleepers, all of us, everyone aboard the ship, just like Richter wanted to. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” whimpered Morris. I thought about grabbing my gun.

  “The reason Henry is here,” she said turning towards me, “is because Norton Morris is the ghost of something that once was. The memory of a program who needs an actual running intelligence to stay in touch with the rest of the ship. He was an A.I. gone completely mad. Now, his data doesn’t even exist in the Construct anymore. Just a memory of file corruption. An error the Construct has learned to live with. His hatred, his malice, his appetite for revenge are all that remain. But with the corruption to the Construct and our ship being so far gone into uncharted space, there’s nothing that can be done. In light of this ship’s current status, the least of my problems is a rogue A.I. ghost that didn’t go quietly into the recycling bin. But now, it requires my full attention. We can authenticate the link between Construct and Bridge. Take my hand Mr. Marvin. I am in full control of Dupree’s girl now. It’s safe.”

  So I did. I reached out and held soft, cold, delicate fingers and fell into silver eyes. I fell into the whirlpool of the universe and it didn’t matter that Morris had thrown himself onto me or that Henry, that great bear of a king, was hugging the life out me, crushing me. Death and her eyes were one in the same.

  Now back in my apartment in Harbor City, the dawn is just a few minutes away. I hope. I check the horizon, standing up and craning my neck toward the side of my little window. I want to see blue streaks in the sky. I want to walk down Becker Street this morning and know that I can still right wrongs, save damsels, and occasionally
hear a good song over a cheap mug of beer. I’m simple that way. I’m human, regardless of my residence in the Construct or the previous Lee Marvin.

  On the other side of the Captain’s eyes, I came to the Auxiliary Bridge, as Dupree’s girl the Captain called it. She told me the main bridge had been smashed to bits a hundred and fifty years earlier. I looked down seeing right through myself. I was there, and I wasn’t.

  “What about Morris?” I asked.

  “Henry finally shot him. Nothing can stand up against your pistol inside the Construct. It’s a Hunter Killer algorithm designed to eradicate any trace of undesired data. Not only did Henry kill him, he never was.”

  I didn’t follow.

  “Mr. Giles, you knew him as Dupree, was my chief engineer. It was his idea of placing it in your hands. As a safeguard. You were his only hobby. Most people have several Avatars for their Construct stories. For pleasure, pain, companionship, many other things. Spacers use them to live lives that extend beyond the finite space of our hulls. But Mr. Giles was a quiet man who loved his engines and me. He died in Oakland in that warehouse. He died trying to save my ship from Richter’s treachery. He died sending you a message.”

  The Captain, “Dupree’s girl”, stood in front of me. She was an old crone if there ever was one. She had short, cropped, spiky hair and thin, papery skin with long blue veins running down scrawny limbs. But her large eyes were still the eyes of Dupree’s girl.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. Maybe the night we spent together in that motel after Dupree got killed made me feel like garbage. Either that or it was the memory of Leonard Giles that I saw in her eyes.

  “Don’t be. It was Richter’s fault. He almost succeeded in killing everybody. Instead he failed and only killed my entire crew. ‘Dupree’ was a scenario, a case, if you prefer. Leonard designed it to let you know about the ship and our situation. About the Construct. He felt you might be able to help in there if something happened to him. Keep the Sleepers, our charges, safe from the negative effects of the unrestricted awareness patch Richter downloaded on to the A.I.s running inside the Construct. Richter killed Leonard and almost everyone else shortly after that.” She turned away from me, staring outwards at something I knew wasn’t there anymore.

  “That night in the motel, after he died,” she said to the universe. “When I was with you. I just wanted to be close to Leonard one last time. And you were his. I hope you don’t mind.”

  I didn’t.

  “Why did Richter kill everyone?”

  “Not everyone. Just my crew. It’s a long story Mr. Marvin. He was a terrorist of sorts. A man who believed that all artificial intelligence should be treated as though alive. That their ‘lives’, data-based though they are, are capable of just as much joy, and just as much suffering, as in the case of Norton Morris, as a human might be. He was insane. That’s why he sabotaged The Olympia, my ship, and sent us off into the void. Next stop Andromeda. No one’s ever been there. You’ll be the first. You and the sleepers.”

  “You have a name for me.” I passed my arm through a nearby bank of colored lights. “Artificial you called it? You may be right. All this might be the truth. But just the same, I’m real. I live in my world. It’ll always be Harbor City, rain and fog, or sunny and hot; not much, but when it is, it’s nice. In its own way, it’s my little slice of humanity. ”

  “Not for long Mr. Marvin. I couldn’t contain Henry the Eighth. Even now he’s grabbing everything from everywhere inside the Construct.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Very. Think of it this way. The Construct, where your world is, is like a candy store. A place where travelers on long journeys, like the sleepers in back, can put their minds and live out fantasies and adventures or even learn skills to prepare them for their work in the colony they were headed towards. Now Henry is running through that candy store grabbing items from every bin and stuffing them into his sack. It will be…strange to say the least.”

  “Why not shut the damn thing down?”

  “It would kill the sleepers, and you. Until we reach a habitable system in the Andromeda galaxy, I have to keep it running. As you can see, I’m not as young as I once was. It’s going to be difficult.”

  I watched the universe outside the windows of the ship. There was so much darkness. I’d always expected more stars. Ahead there was a tiny cluster of them though. I assumed that was Andromeda.

  “Can I help?”

  “I would appreciate that Mr. Marvin.” She swallowed hard.

  “You’re my last knight in shining armor.”

  “I don’t know about the ‘shining’ part.”

  “Here’s a new ‘gun’. Where we come from, The Cantata Assembly, that is a banned weapon. The algorithm inside it has started and ended wars on a galactic scale. In open space, exposed to live data, it could kill millions. But in the Construct, I ask you to use it to right wrongs, protect the sleepers, and occasionally rescue old dames like myself. It’s your Excalibur.” I took the gun from her and for a moment sensed the emptiness of the void I’d seen between the galaxies within it. In its holster under my coat, it felt at home.

  “I guess that makes me the old lady in the lake,” she chuckled dryly. “Not much of a damsel though, eh?”

  “I may not be much of knight. But you’ll always be a fair maiden to me.” I’m a soft touch. It was the thing Lola liked and hated about me. But that’s another story.

  “Thank you Leonard…I mean Mr. Marvin. Thank you.”

  “What do I call you?”

  She thought for a moment. “Just Dupree’s girl. I like that.”

  And now I wait. She said if the sun came up over Harbor City that meant at least Henry hadn’t pulled all the wires and plugs of the Construct in his greedy grab for everything. She assured me, darkly, that there were places where he could get into exactly that sort of trouble. But she also said if the sun came up, it meant at least she could contain him within the Construct. The simulation, our world within the ship, would continue on its long night journey to Andromeda. If she could keep him away from the ‘sleepers,’ whoever they were, and the rest of the ship’s systems, the Construct would continue to run and the sun would rise over Harbor City. At least for tomorrow. It sounded like a lot of work, but she seemed tougher than most.

  Back home in Harbor City, near my window, a deep blue streak appeared within the ink of night. I wondered what our ‘candy store’ would be like in the morning. Henry the Eighth crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on a dinosaur at the head of an army of Panzers? One gun and one slightly used detective didn’t stand much of a chance. Then again, I am Lee Marvin, and the gun is Excalibur.

  The End

  About Nick Cole

  Nick Cole is a working actor living in Southern California. When he is not auditioning for commercials, going out for sitcoms or being shot, kicked, stabbed or beaten by the students of various film schools for their projects, he can often be found as a guard for King Phillip the Second of Spain in the Opera Don Carlo at Los Angeles Opera or some similar role. Nick Cole has been writing for most of his life and acting in Hollywood after serving in the U.S. Army. You can also find him on Twitter.

  Nick is the author of The Wasteland Saga, Soda Pop Soldier, and Apocalypse Weird: The Red King

  Go to Nick's Website

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  This short story originally appeared on ThirdScribe Stories

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