Hawaiian U.F.O. Aliens

by Mel Gilden

  A few minutes later, I pulled up in front of a square, squat building with the words Acme Robot Company painted over the brown door. The place was a lot livelier than it had been when Surfing Samurai Robots had rolled over in its sleep onto their business. Trucks with the silly Acme logo—a robot with a hat like a funnel—rumbled self-importantly out of the paved yard and through the open front gates. Somewhere inside, machinery shrieked as it turned metal into robot parts.

  One of the gates made the fourth wall of a cage for a skinny black dog that, at the moment, was very busy sleeping. As I got out of my car the dog awoke, stretched, and barked at me. Bill and I looked at the dog. An Acme truck went by, not taking much of the dog's attention.

  'That's Benny,' I said. 'Any minute now, he'll do his trick for you.'

  'He pulls rabbits from hats?' Bill said.

  'Watch.'

  A second later, Benny got tired of barking and sat down to have a good scratch. Bill didn't say anything, so I said, 'That's it.'

  Bill laughed, but he always did that. We went into the small building through the brown door.

  The dimness and smell of age were familiar, but at the desk where Mr Harold Chesnik had given me the address of Surfing Samurai Robots sat a tall, thin woman with a long, sharp nose—not quite a Toomler nose, but close. Her bony fingers moved quickly over the keys of an old mechanical adding machine. She pulled the lever and tore off the tape.

  She glanced at me and said, 'May I help you?' as if she'd memorized the sounds but the words had no meaning for her. The tape was what really interested her, but she took another look at me anyway. I was worth a look, I guess, if you hadn't seen me before.

  'Mr Chesnik here?' I said as I walked farther into the office. I'd checked the overstuffed leather chair where he usually slept, and nobody was in it.

  Now I could see he was at the other desk, with one hand against his forehead and the other turning over sheets of paper. His face said that he wasn't happy with what the papers were telling him. Either that, or his stomach hurt. One knee was pistoning up and down a mile a minute. He wore the same heavy black framed glasses, and what could have been the same grey sweater, as the last time I'd seen him.

  'Mr Chesnik?' I said.

  Mr Chesnik looked up and smiled. He adjusted his glasses and cried, 'Zoot! Marsha, this is the Zoot I was telling you about.'

  Marsha nodded as if she'd expected that, and in a voice as sharp as her nose, told me without convincing me that she was pleased to make my acquaintance. She watched me narrowly, as if she thought I might walk out with a chair under my coat.

  Mr Chesnik sighed and said, 'You never call. You never write.' He saw Bill then and waggled a finger at me. 'You still owe me plenty for that robot.' He chuckled, inviting me not to take his accusation too seriously.

  'I need more,' I said.

  The chuckle disappeared down a drain and Mr Chesnik shook his head. 'Bay City manners,' he said. 'How much?'

  'A couple hundred bucks.'

  'And expenses?'

  'Mostly for the office bourbon bottle.'

  He laughed easily, as if we weren't talking about money, and said, 'So all right, already. You can still do the Chandler patter. That butters no parsnips with me.'

  'I have something you might want to buy.'

  'Like what?'

  'Can we go somewhere and talk?'

  Marsha reacted as if I'd slapped her in the face. She said, 'Mr Chesnik has no secrets from me.'

  'Bay City secrets,' I said.

  Mr Chesnik ran his tongue over his lips and stood up. I still came up only to the middle button of his sweater. 'Come on. We'll talk.'

  I followed him down a short hall, Bill clattering behind me. Through the wall, I could feel Marsha simmering slowly over low heat. We passed a bathroom that had seen a lot of use and a storage room full of boxes big enough to hold cockroaches from the bathroom—though there may not have been enough boxes.

  At the other end of the hall was the garage, brighter now with a garage door open. The air compressor began to chug. An Oriental guy in grey work clothes was standing at a low rough table, banging on a piece of machinery with a big hammer. He stopped long enough to smile at us, then went back to work. He couldn't have been the Oriental guy I was looking for. Nobody could get that greasy since the night before.

  Mr Chesnik said, 'Marsha wants to see you.'

  The Oriental guy nodded and put down the hammer before he walked back into the office. Mr Chesnik took me to a corner of the garage and turned on a light hanging by a cord over a small workbench on which insect-like electronic parts were strewn. He sat down on a low, worn stool with a cracked leather seat that may once have been red.

  'Nu?' he said.

  'It'll be new to you,' I said, hoping I didn't sound like the idiot I felt myself to be.

  Mr Chesnik laughed, but Bill didn't. I said, 'I need some money, about a hundred bucks, but I don't want a loan. I want you to buy something from me.'

  'I'm suspicious already. Go ahead.'

  From my coat pocket I took the slaberingeo spine I'd brought from my sneeve. I kept a hold on it so it wouldn't float to the ceiling. Bill watched Mr Chesnik take it from me and study it as if it were a diamond. He let it pull his hand upward, where it bobbed like a seagull on water. Except for the occasional truck going by, the garage was quiet. Marsha hadn't fired up her adding machine again. Maybe she was done adding. Maybe she and the Oriental guy had their ears to the wall with hope springing eternal.

  'What is it?'

  'Sort of a craft from the simple native artisans of Bay City.'

  'It could be that, I suppose. Why is it worth a hundred dollars? Money don't grow on trees—obviously not even in Bay City.'

  'I don't know. But a little bit of anti-gravity must have its uses.'

  Mr Chesnik grunted and turned toward the bench. He took something from his pocket and unfolded it into a small, sharp knife that he used to hack off two bits of the spine. He put a bit into the heel of each of his shoes and stood up, a smile growing on his face, blossoming on his face, absolutely blooming on his face. 'I'm dancing,' he said, and shuffled his feet about stiffly. I got the feeling that he didn't dance very often.

  I said, 'What do you say?'

  'We could sell these. Call them Slice O' Heaven Shoe Pads.'

  'You know we can't. Not even if it were a good idea.'

  He kind of bounced on his heels, enjoying it. 'OK, Zoot. The money is yours if you'll tell me more about this stuff.'

  'It don't grow on trees.'

  He considered that before he said, 'I didn't know we got secrets between us.'

  'Do you tell me everything?'

  Mr Chesnik shrugged and turned the spine over and over in one hand.

  I said, 'I can tell you this: If you begin to have a run of bad luck, get rid of the spine. All of it. Even the bits in your shoes. What you'll be having is not bad luck, but statistical anomalies caused by an unbalanced spine.'

  'Statistical anomalies,' he said enjoying the way the words felt in his mouth. 'You won't tell me any more?'

  'No.'

  'I must be going soft in the head.' He folded his knife and put it in a sweater pocket with the spine, and buttoned the pocket. On his way back to the office, he walked pretty light for a guy as old and tired as he had been a moment before.

  As we got to the office, the Oriental guy came in the front door carrying three cups in a cardboard box. They smelled like coffee. Not good coffee, but even bad coffee smells pretty good. He put a cup in front of Marsha and another on Mr Chesnik's desk. He and Marsha watched while Mr Chesnik opened a heavy desk drawer with a key and took out a pile of bills. He counted a hundred fifty dollars into my outstretched palm, each one personally etched by the incredulous stares of Marsha and the Oriental guy.

  I folded the money away, and Mr Chesnik shook my hand as he wished me good luck. 'Knowing you, you'll probably need it.'

  'Yeah. I'm always walking into a door or something.'
<
br />   Mr Chesnik enjoyed that.

  I nodded to Marsha and the Oriental guy. They were still using their mouths for fly catchers as Bill and I went out.

  In the car I said, 'The address of the Big Orange Taxi Company.' Bill gave me an address downtown and then directions how to get there.

  We were driving east on Adams Boulevard

  when he said, 'I never saw anything like that spine before.'

  'You don't want to know what it is. Trust me.'

  'Sure. I'm built that way.'

  That's the main difference between a robot and a human.

  Chapter 8

  Con Carney's Lucky Day

  I TOOK Adams downtown. Since it was the middle of the morning and not rush hour, the traffic was only hideous and not impossible.

  We went north through a not very exclusive residential area with houses that looked as if they'd been blown there by the wind, but had probably been there for years. Pale paint was flaked and patchy, as if the houses had the mange. Lawns were thin and yellow, and the few stunted trees looked not very happy to be there. A lot of wild kids were running around the streets, and clumps of discontented adults gathered on corners drinking from brown paper bags, smoking cigarettes and talking.

  Then the houses were behind us, and we were gliding past warehouses decorated with graffiti and marred by broken windows. The warehouses farther on were in better condition, and belonged to people who told you all about it with big signs painted in bold, manly letters.

  Traffic thickened up again, and Bill told me to turn onto a side street, where there was a garage with an open door not quite as wide as the Santa Monica Freeway.

  I drove into the cool, dim building and parked in an empty space near a vest pocket office that was tacked onto a side wall like an I afterthought. Outside it were three blocky chairs with chipping hide, held together by curved metal tubes and good intentions.

  Through the glass walls of the office. I could see two women and a man. One of the women was talking into a microphone that rested on a little table pushed against the wall, and the other was at a desk, labouring over some complicated forms. The guy was leaning back in his chair, looking lazily through cigarette smoke, memorizing the cracked yellow ceiling. I wouldn't like the cigarette smoke. I never did.

  The garage was full of pale green taxis, each with the words BIG ORANGE TAXI COMPANY on the side. Bill and I got out of the Belvedere and slammed our doors. Each slam made a big boom in the vast place. Anything that moved would make a big echo in a place like that. There was the same smell of ancient grease as filled the garage at the Acme Robot Company.

  Bill and I went into the office. No friendly bell tinkled. We stood on our side of a beat-up counter and waited for somebody to notice us.

  The woman at the microphone was small and slim, and had short dark hair. She whispered into the microphone and kept notes. I cleared my throat, and the woman at the desk glanced at me as if I were a window shade moving in the breeze, just something that distracted her now and then. The guy never moved. He was settled into his chair like a lump of clay. His round, fleshy head was nearly bald, but where I could see them below the rolled-up sleeves of a glaringly white shirt, his arms looked as if they were covered in black carpeting. I had been right about not liking the cigarette smoke.

  'Excuse me,' I said.

  The woman at the desk dropped her pencil and said, 'May I help you?' It was the same voice I'd heard on the telephone.

  'I'm a little embarrassed, actually. One of your drivers was nicer to me than he had to be and I'd like to thank him. But I don't know his name.'

  The guy at the back desk said, 'Why didn't you thank him at the time?' He never looked at me. Maybe he wasn't memorizing the ceiling, but the cigarette smoke. It would be a big job.

  'I was,' I laughed nervously, 'not quite myself when he picked me up.'

  'Are you quite yourself now?'

  Bill said, 'Yock!'

  'Look: all I remember was that I was at the Sparkle Room in Malibu and I needed a ride home because I wasn't quite as sober as I had been when I walked in. A taxi took me home. It was driven by a big black guy with a moustache like a pair of buggy whips.' I'd seen buggy whips in westerns. You can learn a lot from TV. 'I have a couple of bucks here that belong to him.'

  'Sounds like Con's lucky day,' the woman at the desk said.

  'Yeah.' The man leaned forward in his chair and his feet loudly struck the floor. 'Just leave the money, sir. We'll see that he gets it.'

  'I'd like to give it to him myself. More personal that way.'

  The guy frowned and moved his lips in and out. 'There seems to be a distinct lack of trust in the air,' he said.

  'How can you tell with all the cigarette smoke?' The man glared at me, but the trick at the microphone shot a warm smile in my direction. The man said, 'You got your damn nerve sticking your nose in here and making judgements.'

  'Nose,' the woman at the desk said, chuckling. 'Look, I don't care what you smoke. What has that got to do with trust anyway?' I tried to make it sound as if I didn't suspect Con would never see anything I gave this guy.

  'OK,' the guy said. He leaned back in his chair and said, 'Be smart. It ain't Con's shift and he don't live so close. It'll take a while for him to get here.'

  'When's my next appointment?' I said to Bill.

  'Appointment?' Bill said.

  I told the man, 'I guess I'm open for the next few hours.'

  The woman said, 'Actually, Con's here. He came in early today.' That was clever enough to make her laugh.

  'Sure,' the man said, 'I forgot.'

  'So do we whistle or rub a lamp or what?'

  'Call him, Dinah,' the man said.

  Dinah flicked a switch on her microphone and spoke softly into it. Outside the office, her voice boomed, 'Con Carney to the office. Con Carney to the office, please.'

  I nodded. Nothing happened. The guy blew a long lungful of flannel into the air. Nothing happened some more. Nobody even looked in my direction. It was quiet in that office. The woman at the desk jumped and put her hand to her throat when I said, 'There's something about your company I don't understand.'

  The guy had gone back to holding up the ceiling with his gaze, but the woman at the desk said 'What's that?'

  'Shouldn't all the taxis run by the Big Orange Taxi Company be orange instead of green?'

  The guy laughed as if he were clearing his throat and actually looked at me again. The ceiling didn't fall down.

  The woman behind the desk smiled. At last she was enjoying something. She said, 'It's not orange like the colour. It's orange like the fruit. You know, sometimes L.A. is called the Big Orange.' She must have noticed the stupified expression on my face because she went on, 'You know. Like some people call New York the Big Apple?'

  The guy said, 'Where you from, you never heard of the Big Apple?'

  'Bay City.'

  'Oh?' said the guy. 'I'd have guessed farther than that.'

  'You'd guess wrong. My little problem with toxic waste and nose drops always throws people off. I win a lot of bar bets. Where is this Con?'

  'He'll be along. If you and your bot waited outside, people could get their work done.'

  'Sure. You probably have another pack of cigarettes to go through before quitting time.'

  His glare pushed me and Bill out of the glassed-in office. Bill plopped himself down on one of the ancient chairs, and I settled beside him. They were as comfortable as a couple of sacks of cement. I asked Bill about this fruit business and he tried to explain it to me, but one of us was too dumb. I ended up saying, 'You might as well call Malibu the Big Yoyogurt.'

  We watched Big Orange taxis go in and out. Somewhere in the garage, somebody was running machinery that sounded like animals fighting and dying. Not more than ten minutes later, a sturdy-looking black guy walked up from the back of the garage. He was wearing a Dodger's T-shirt and cap, jeans, and some ancient shoes held together by their scuff marks. He was no bigger than the guy
in the office, but his muscles had actually seen some use. He had a wide, intelligent face and hair cropped so close that it looked like a pattern of iron fillings. Under his flat nose was the famous moustache. It was even bigger than I'd imagined it, and curled at the ends like loose springs. He could have been the guy I was looking for.

  Bill and I stood up and he said, 'You the guy looking for me?' You could polish your car with that voice.

  'That's me.'

  'Do I know you?' He didn't seem inclined to shake hands. The three people in the office were watching us as if we were taking off our clothes.

  'People always ask me that. I have one of the eleven average faces.'

  He laughed as if he meant it. 'Sez you. With that beezer I'd remember.' He suddenly looked grim. 'And I don't.'

  'I guess you would at that. I was never in your taxi, but I need some information.'

  'Phyllis said you'd make it worth my while.'

  'Trust Phyllis.'

  He studied me, not hiding it. Something happened behind his eyes, and he suddenly became as cagey as three kids dividing a candy bar.

  I said, 'I'm looking for the driver who picked up a pair of Oriental tourists from the Sparkle Room in Malibu last night.'

  'What's the beef?'

  'No beef. No chicken either. Just information.'

  'Are you for real?'

  'Sure. Want me to pinch you?'

  I surprised him with that, but he took it well. He said, 'We could dance like this all afternoon. What do you want to know?'

  'Where did you take them after you left the Sparkle Room?'

  'That stuff's confidential.'

  From my pocket I took the money Mr Chesnik had given me and counted off fifty.

  'I could lose my job.'

  'Not if you keep your mouth shut. They think I'm paying you off for good service.'

  Carney thought about that for a moment, and then said, 'I took them to a place over on the west side called Kilroy's.' He frowned as he took the fifty and made it disappear. He said, 'You know anything about them?'

  'Not much.'

  'Nobody called me but I knew they wanted a cab. It was like ESP or something.'

  'ESP?'

  'Extra Sensory Perception,' Bill said. 'Mind reading.' Top hats. Mind reading. What next? I said, 'I guess the other guy didn't know much about them either.'