Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Well, Charlie,” he said, “you’ve won your bet.” He took a ten dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to Bruce.

  “Thanks,” Bruce said, following Gordon’s lead, nonchalantly pocketing the money.

  “I don’t understand,” Blithely said.

  “I used to tell Mr. Morrison here he was too formal, too uptight. I said he was too well-mannered to start a commotion. Charlie bet me ten bucks he could get the manager of the best hotel in town to call me and complain that he was crazy. I never thought you’d go through with it, Charlie.”

  “Well, you annoyed me,” Bruce said.

  “So this has all been a practical joke?” Blithely asked.

  “Of course it has,” Gordon said. “Does Mr. Morrison look crazy to you?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Blithely said. But there was still a shade of doubt in his voice.

  “Thanks for being such a good sport about it,” Bruce said. “There’ll be a nice bonus added to the bill for you, personally, for taking this in such good humor.”

  “Oh, Mr. Morrison, there’s no need—”

  But Bruce waved him away with a lordly gesture. When Blithely left, even he was chuckling at the joke.

  When they were alone, Bruce went to the bar and poured Gordon a shot of bourbon, and accompanied it with branchwater on the side. He poured himself a glass of Vichy. Both men sat down on one of the couches. Gordon sipped his bourbon.

  “Damn good bourbon, Charlie,” he said.

  “They have only the best here,” Bruce said.

  “So I see. Charlie, what in the name of Sam Hill went on here?”

  “Nothing, apparently,” Bruce said. “You should have taken me in. I’m obviously ’round the bend.”

  Gordon didn’t reply until he had his pipe going. While malodorous fumes rose in the air, he said, “Even if you were crazy, I’d never let on to a guy like that.”

  Bruce nodded. “Blithely is not a sympathetic type, is he?”

  Gordon shook his head. “I’d arrange to have you committed all by myself, if that was what was needed. Charlie, are you crazy?”

  “Why ask me?” Bruce said. “How would I know?”

  “I’ve gotten to know you pretty well over the years,” Gordon said. “You and I were involved in one of the toughest cases of this century. Charlie, I lost my belief in organized religion a long time ago. And I think I’ve lost about half my faith in justice, too. But one thing I still believe in is Batman.”

  Gordon looked up from his drink. He saw that “Charlie Morrison” was smiling at him.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You. Police Commissioner of Gotham City and you don’t even know a loony when you see one. But you know what, Jim? I’m just as bad. I don’t believe for a moment I’m crazy. Tonight has proven it to me.”

  “How’s that, Charlie?”

  “I’ve seen the Joker several times in recent months. Just quick little glimpses, then he vanishes. It had me worried. I followed him into this hotel, or so I thought. I decided it would be worthwhile to check in myself and see what was going on. All these incidents, all in one night, convince me that someone is trying to put something over on me. I don’t know how, or why—not yet—but I’m going to find out.”

  “Frankly, I’m glad you’re doing this,” Gordon said. “We’ve been getting a lot of rumors recently, nothing we can pin down, but stuff that keeps on popping up. About something going down that’s both criminal and political. Something involving important people. Something involving the New Era Hotel.”

  “Interesting,” Bruce said. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing definite. Just a lot of ominous-sounding rumors. You always hear these crazy stories about new criminal combines from foreign countries. This time there just might be something to it.”

  “I’m going to see what turns up,” Bruce said.

  “I’m glad. The way I see it, we’ve got just one thing to worry about.”

  “What’s that?” Bruce asked.

  “I know you’re sane and you know you’re sane. But what if we’re both wrong?”

  Two days passed without incident. Charlie Morrison did all the things a wealthy young bachelor might do in a hotel like the New Era. He sampled all their nightclubs and watched the shows. He listened to the comedians and laughed as heartily as anyone else. He tasted the gourmet specialties in several exquisite restaurants. He drank sparingly and turned down the offers of drugs and women from the bellboys.

  Early on the evening of the third day he saw her again. She stepped out of the New Era beauty parlor just as he was coming out of the magazine shop. It was her unmistakably, Ilona, the woman he had ridden up with in the elevator and later seen murdered in her suite.

  She wore a dark silk dress, and had a turquoise scarf knotted carelessly around her neck.

  “Excuse me, Ilona,” he said. But she ignored him and hurried through the lobby, going through a door marked PRIVATE. Bruce followed. He was in a corridor that seemed to lead to the kitchen area. The lighting was bad, and there was deep dust on the floor: the New Eras spick-and-span look did not extend to the off-stage areas. Bruce decided he wouldn’t eat here any more if this was a sample of their true housekeeping. He rounded a corner, and there she was.

  “Stop following me!” she said.

  “Just a couple of questions,” Bruce said.

  “Oh. Well, if that’s all—” She smiled, then opened her purse and took out a cigarette. She found a small golden lighter in her purse. She flicked it once and a cloud of yellow gas sprayed into Bruce’s face. She dropped the lighter and fled as soon as Bruce hit the floor.

  You can fool all of the superheroes some of the time, but you can’t fool any of them all of the time. Especially not Batman. Lacking Superman’s invulnerability, Batman had to rely on cunning, foresight, and his preternaturally keen eyesight. He had seen at once that the object Ilona took from her purse was no ordinary lighter. Her very air of unconcern gave her away. He guessed what it was, but did not let on that he knew. He was holding his breath when she sprayed him. He fell to the floor and was gratified to hear the tinkle of the little gas container as she dropped it beside him.

  He got up and picked up the little metal case. It was cunningly fashioned, turned on a metal lathe with a jeweler’s precision. The curves of its surfaces were deep and complex. All in all it was one of the finest bits of machine work he had seen in a long time. And he was one to know: Bruce Wayne, Batman, had his own tool shop and his own metal-working equipment. He knew good work when he saw it.

  Good work, yes. But who’s work was it?

  He didn’t know. But he had an idea where to go to find out.

  First, though, a change of attire.

  Night fell, deep and dangerous, on Gotham City.

  Darkness came down over the Northside docks, where sailors of a dozen nations traded with whores from half the continent. The gin mills of Gotham City were notorious from Montreal to Valparaiso. Recent defense contracts in Subiuz County adjoining Gotham City had brought many new people into the city. They came to work in the Subiuz County defense plants. At night, after finishing their shifts, they wanted some fun. They were not particular about how they got it.

  Fun tended to get rough in the more noisome parts of Gotham City such as Limehouse. A man could get knocked on the head and rolled with little difficulty. If he was smart, he took his lumps and went away, a sadder but wiser man. If he tried to do something about it, he was due for an even more unpleasant surprise—such as waking up to find himself wearing lead-filled skiboots and sinking in the garbage-strewn waters of the Limehouse River in the company of eels and crabs.

  Limehouse was an old industrial slum, a dark and dangerous place. The more upright inhabitants had been trying to get the street lighting back on for a long time, without success, because of a corrupt city administration that sold all the lighting fixtures to a Mexican entrepreneur.

  Darkness bred crime in the stews of the city.

>   Darkness bred all creatures of the night.

  Especially bats.

  It was close to midnight, and Limehouse was just coming into its fullest flower. The drunken and motley crowds of sailors parading the streets did not notice a shadow that passed briefly across the huge lemon moon before it dipped down to ground level and came to rest in one of the narrow backyards.

  Batman, in full uniform and mask, folded the small batwinged Batcopter and stowed it in its compact carrying case. With a small but powerful Batlight he briefly consulted a map of his own devising. It was a flat tablet about the size of a sheet of typing paper, and less than an inch thick. Illuminated from beneath, it could be scrolled to reveal highly detailed maps of any part of Gotham City.

  Batman checked his coordinates again. Yes, he was in the right location. It had been almost two years since he had come to this particular address. He hoped that Tony Marrotti was still in business.

  Orienting himself, Batman moved silently to the back door of the sagging one-story frame house nearby. He moved like a shadow. The full moon picked up the white glints of his eyes beneath the black mask. That was all that was visible as he jimmied the door and slipped inside.

  The house was divided into several rooms, just as he had remembered. He was in the rearmost, the storage room. Here, neatly laid out on greasy steel shelving, was a variety of metal tubing, cogwheels, nuts and bolts in steel bins, reels of electrical wire of various gauges, and many other things of similar nature. The door to the outer rooms was closed, but a yellow oblong of light shone from beneath it. Batman listened at the door. He could hear a radio softly playing jazz, and the scrape of footsteps as a man moved around within.

  A few minutes’ listening convinced him that only one man was inside. Batman opened the door and stepped into the room.

  The man had been working at a small lathe. He looked up abruptly as Batman came through, his hand diving toward a rear pocket. Before he could draw the gun he kept there, Batman was across the room and had taken the weapon out of his hand.

  “Not so fast, Marrotti,” he said. “You don’t want to plug your old friend Batman, do you?”

  “Sorry, Batman,” Marrotti said. “Didn’t know it was you. I went for the rod before looking to see who it was.”

  “Do you usually shoot first without looking to see who it is?”

  “When they come through my storage room after midnight, yes. But you’re very welcome here, Batman. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Not while I’m on duty,” Batman said.

  “But this is something special. My uncle, Lou, you remember him, don’t you, sent over this bottle of liqueur from the old country. Try a shot with me for old time’s sake.”

  “A sip, no more,” Batman said.

  Marrotti crossed the room and went to a cupboard. He took out a large long-necked bottle with a florid Italian label on it.

  Marrotti was a short man, bull-chested and thicknecked. His head was round and covered in crisp black curls. He had a wide, generous mouth and clever, shifty eyes. He walked with a noticeable limp, a souvenir of the time some years ago when Batman had managed to save him from a gang that had trapped him on a tenement roof near his pigeon coop and shot out his kneecap.

  “Good to see you, Batman,” Marrotti said. “Whatcha been up to? Haven’t seen any newspaper writeups about you in quite a while.”

  Batman ignored that. “How have you been keeping, Marrotti?”

  “Pretty well, Batman, pretty well.”

  “Is crime still profitable?”

  “Aw, come on, you know I don’t do that stuff anymore.”

  “I know that you do,” Batman said. “But I’m not here about that. You’re not big enough for me to go after. No insult intended, but I need to reserve my time for the really big ones.”

  “I know that,” Marrotti said, “and I respect it.”

  “I need some information.”

  “Sure,” Marrotti said. “Shoot. Only kidding, I mean, what about?”

  Batman took a pouch out of one of the pockets on his utility belt and opened it. He removed the small cannister with which Ilona had tried to gas him earlier and handed it to Marrotti.

  Marrotti looked at it and seemed about to ask a question. Then he changed his mind, fished a pair of granny glasses out of a greasy vest pocket, put them on and studied the cannister carefully.

  “Where’d you get this?” he asked.

  “Never mind. Tell me who made it, and who for. I thought this might have been your handiwork.”

  Marrotti shook his head. “This is high-class machining. Takes better equipment than I’ve got to do this. See this beading? You need a zero-null drill press and hoe-line redactor to do that. I don’t need that for my line of equipment.”

  “Can you identify it for me?” Batman asked.

  “Maybe. Mind if I cut it apart?”

  “Go ahead,” Batman said.

  Marrotti limped across the room and adjusted the overhead floodlights so that he could get a good look at what he was doing. He set up the casing in a vise, then cut it apart with a diamond-toothed saw. He examined the interior of the two hemispheres, frowning, then looked at them again with a magnifying glass. After studying both carefully he discarded one and turned his attention to the other. He gave a grunt when he found what he wanted.

  “Look here, Batman. See this symbol?”

  Batman peered through the magnifying glass and made out a tiny V with a crossbar stamped into the metal.

  “That’s a manufacturing symbol,” Marrotti said.

  “Do you know whose it is?”

  “I’ve seen it somewhere but I don’t remember. But I must have it here somewhere.”

  Marrotti went to a sagging bookshelf and pulled down a thick book. “Manufacturers’ symbols,” he explained. He leafed quickly through, his fingers going deftly to the right page.

  “Here it is. One of the trademarked symbols of ARDC. That stands for Armadillo Rex Development Corporation. Says here they’re based in Ogdensville, Texas. The plant manager and chief stockholder is Rufus ‘Red’ Murphy.”

  “Do you know anything about these people?” Batman asked.

  “ARDC designs and sells special arms. They specialize in exotics, as they’re sometimes called in the trade. They turn out anything from miniature spy stuff to complete missile launch systems.”

  Marrotti took off his glasses and put them away in a worn case. Then he turned to Batman and said, “What was in this cannister? Some kind of tear gas?”

  Batman shook his head. “A gas evidently designed to make a man sleep. Or possibly kill him. I didn’t inhale it to find out.”

  “Very wise.”

  “Do you know anything about this?”

  Marrotti went to his jacket, hanging from a wooden peg on a wall, and fished out a cigarette. He fired up and said, “There’s been talk about new development in anti-personnel gases. In some compounds they can put a man out for twenty-four hours without harming him. Change the formula slightly and you kill the man dead. All without telltale odor, mind you. In another formulation, LSD extracts are used to make a hallucinatory gas designed to disorient an enemy.”

  “Interesting,” Batman said. “Is that of interest to the criminal element?”

  “You can bet on it. Can you think of a better way to stage a bank robbery? Get everybody tripping and seeing visions or horrors while you walk away with the loot. But nobody’s got any of the stuff yet. Otherwise you’d be hearing more about it.”

  Batman could testify that someone, at least, had some of that gas. But there was no need to tell Marrotti that.

  Bruce Wayne, disguised as Charlie Morrison, was at the Gotham City Municipal Airport at nine o’clock the next morning. He was booked first class to Ogdensville, Texas, with only one brief stop in Atlanta. His two suitcases of equipment made him overweight, but he was able to get them on the same flight. There was no inspection for in-country luggage, but even if an inspector had looked into it, he would
have seen cases of industrial samples. Only when they were assembled would they constitute the essential equipment Batman found useful on many of his cases.

  Atlanta was bright and steaming. Bruce had time for a coffee in the first-class lounge, and a look at the newspaper. Then it was time to board again. Miraculously, the flight was nearly on time.

  The trip passed uneventfully. It was mid-afternoon, Central Time, when the big Boeing 747 put down at Staked Plains Airport serving Ogdensville and Amarillo. A telex sent earlier had alerted Finley Lopez, an investment consultant on energy and defense matters, with his main office in Houston. He was one of the foremost investment consultants in the Southwest, and someone Bruce often worked with in his Morrison persona. Lopez had taken a local flight to Ogdensville and was at the airport to meet him.

  “How good to see you, Mr. Morrison!” Finley Lopez was a large man, suave and easy-mannered, his complexion a light olive. He had a narrow black moustache and bright brown eyes with dark pouches under them. A small scar above his left eye was the last reminder of a tough childhood growing up in the barrios of Brownsville.

  “You’re looking well, Finley. Not letting the senoritas take up all of your time, are you?”

  Lopez grinned. His reputation as a lady’s man was known from Bayou City, Louisiana, clear west to Albuquerque. “Not quite all, Mr. Morrison. Business comes first. But I could show you one fine old time if you’d let me.”

  “Good of you to offer,” Bruce said, “but I’m afraid I’m here this time on business.”

  “So let’s get it done, then we can paint the town red. Or maybe you’d like a real old-style Texas barbecue at my ranch. My wife Esmeralda has a special way with beef ribs.”

  “I remember Esmeralda’s cooking well,” Bruce said. “Please give her my love. But I’m just here for the day. I return to Gotham City tonight.”

  “Well, tarnation,” Lopez said with mock annoyance. “Can’t get you to have any fun at all. What can I do for you, Mr. Morrison?”

  “I’m interested in the ARDC corporation.”