The Wrong Stuff td-125

by Warren Murphy

  But then things started to go wrong.

  First the young one managed to break the camera that was trained on him. No small feat, considering he did it with a wood chip the size of a pencil thrown down a corridor thirty feet long and two feet wide.

  The old one wouldn't be so lucky. He had survived a two-story fall, but there was no way he could last in the basement crocodile pit.

  McQueen's confidence evaporated when he saw the old one leap over the head of his fiercest faux crocodile. The animal's camera eyes twisted around just in time to see the Asian riding the croc's tail like a surfer on a board-snip the wire that connected the animal to the rest of the house. After that, this image went dead, as well.

  Sitting in his loft on the edge of a neatly made guest bed, McQueen chewed his nails nervously. "What's happening?" the novelist asked his TV.

  "I am attempting to ascertain that now," said a voice from the television's speaker.

  Mr. Gordons had wormed his way like a virus through the electrical system all over the grounds. "Are they dead?" McQueen asked anxiously. "I thought you'd know if they were dead."

  "Visual inspection has failed," Gordons explained. "Although I am possessed with the ability to detect things such as heartbeats, perspiration and human odors, this is a function of my primary assembly that is not easily rerouted."

  "So you're saying that the house becomes an extension of you, but that your body stays separate?" McQueen suggested. "Like an isolated control unit."

  "Essentially, yes," Gordons said.

  "Well, that's just great!" McQueen snapped, jumping to his feet. "Those guys are probably running around loose right now, and you don't even know where. What kind of good-for-nothing assimilating android are you?"

  "I am the kind of assimilating android who does not accept failure," Gordons replied coldly. "You were supposed to deliver my enemies to me, yet it is possible that you have done the opposite. I need to determine which is the case. Since I am unable to rely on your security cameras, I require your assistance. You will come back to the main house and conduct a visual search for their bodies."

  McQueen's eyes sprang wide.

  "Me?" he mocked. He shook his head violently. "No way, Jose. If you're afraid of those guys, there's nothing you can do to get me back in that house."

  The bulbs in three lamps around the bedroom simultaneously exploded.

  "On the other hand-" McQueen began.

  The voice of Mr. Gordons interrupted. "Wait," the android instructed.

  An image appeared on the television screen. It was warped into the bowl shape of a pinhole security camera's transmission. There was no sound to accompany the black-and-white image.

  As curls of black smoke rose from the bedroom lamps, Stewart McQueen sat woodenly back on the edge of the bed, his eyes trained with sick fascination on the TV screen.

  REMO BOUNDED down the main staircase in two massive strides. He was hopping over the broken chandelier when he heard a painful crash of wood. When he spun for the source, relief flooded his tension-filled face.

  The Master of Sinanju was whirling up into the foyer amid the shattered remnants of the basement door.

  "You are safe," the old man cried.

  "That's open to debate," Remo replied tightly. "That spider isn't a spider after all. It's Mr. Gordons."

  Chiun nodded sharply. "He has insinuated himself into this entire dwelling."

  Remo still felt the powerful electrical hum all around them. It now seemed even more menacing. "I think I know how to put a stop to that," Remo said. "But we have to make ourselves a door first." They found the front door still sealed shut. It reacted to their experimental blows as did the walls in the upstairs passageway. The surface became adaptable, accepting their fists rather than surrendering to them.

  But for Remo, two things were different than they had been upstairs. Now he knew who his opponent was, and more importantly, Chiun was at his side.

  Working together, the two Masters of Sinanju synchronized their attack. They treated the door like a living thing, setting up a counter-rhythm to the steady vibrations the door and wall were giving off.

  In a moment the door began to buzz. An instant later it began to shriek. Soon after that the thick steel sheet buried at the center of the reinforced door shattered like an echoing wineglass. The wood collapsed around it, and Remo and Chiun slipped through the new-formed opening.

  They bounded down the front steps to the walk. They had no sooner reached ground than Remo heard rustling from the scruffy bushes beside the steps. He had barely time to turn to the sound when he saw two small black figures dart into view. They were two feet tall and hideously ugly. When he saw them, Remo didn't know whether he should run or laugh.

  The two metal bats that had watched Remo and Chiun's arrival from the stone pillars above the main gates had been given a new purpose as makeshift watchdogs. Metal mouths open wide, they scurried from the underbrush.

  They came trailing thin wires. Remo saw that the cords ran back down the walk and up into the gateposts, connecting the metal creatures with the house security system.

  "Oh, this is just too weird," Remo groused as one of the little bats tried to bite his ankle.

  "I have discovered the secret of vanquishing these beasts," Chiun intoned. He was skipping back and forth to avoid his own bat. "Promise me that we will buy a home in this province, and I will share it with you."

  "No dice," Remo said. "Besides, it's Gordons I'm worried about, not his wind-up dolls."

  Leaning, he braced his hand against his bat's head, holding it to the ground. As it snapped and bit fruitlessly at empty air, he grabbed one of its extended wings. With a pained wrench of metal, he tore it loose.

  With the curved tip of the wing, he sliced the bat's wires. The creature fell silent.

  Seeing that his pupil had found the secret on his own, Chiun frowned unhappily. With an angry exhale of air, he snapped the wires on his own bat. With a sharp sandal, he toe-kicked it back into the bushes.

  Wing in hand, Remo struck off across the lawn. Tucking hands inside his kimono sleeves, Chiun trailed Remo as the younger man circled the house.

  On the west side Remo found what he was looking for. Thick power cables were strung from a pole out on the street to the corner of the house.

  Raising his bat's wing over his shoulder, Remo let it sail. The heavy metal wing sang through the air like a misshapen boomerang, slicing up through the cables. With a snap of rubber and a tiny popping spark it ripped through the wires, burying itself deep in the side of Stewart McQueen's suddenly silent haunted house.

  With the power cut, Remo and Chiun circled back to the front walk.

  The electrical hum no longer rang in their ears. The looming house now seemed more pathetic than menacing.

  And somewhere inside that house, Mr. Gordons was even now in the process of disentangling himself from the elaborate electrical system.

  Remo looked over at Chiun, his eyes level. "You hold him down while I pull off seven of his legs," he suggested in a tone flat with menace. "He can run in circles till his battery runs out once and for all."

  Without another word, the two men marched back up the porch stairs. When they disappeared inside, the broken front door remained open and silent on the cold Maine evening.

  "HELLO! You in there?"

  Stewart McQueen desperately slammed a flat palm against the top of his TV. With the other hand he fiddled with the front control panel, flipping from channel to channel.

  Nothing. The TV had gone dead.

  He had seen the two men march through the foyer. Since the camera didn't angle downward, he lost sight of them when they headed for the door. He realized they had gotten free as soon as the screen switched to an exterior view. From the child's-eye view of his hidden gate bats, he had seen the two of them descend the stairs.

  The picture had bounced crazily for a few seconds. That hadn't lasted long. It was a few moments after the bat cameras died that the power wen
t out.

  No matter how hard McQueen struck the TV, Mr. Gordons stubbornly refused to respond. He was winding up to give it one last mighty swat when he heard a sound out front.

  Squealing tires. The noise was rapidly followed by the sounds of car doors slamming shut.

  The TV was forgotten. Limping on his injured leg, McQueen hurried over to the bay window.

  From the carriage house he had an unobstructed view of the street.

  A black van was parked at the curb. Two men were hurrying from the cab to the back. As McQueen watched, they popped the rear door. A dozen figures dressed in white marched down to the road with military precision. It was dark so McQueen couldn't be sure, but they appeared to be wearing some kind of domed helmets.

  He lost the men behind some trees as they hurried up the sidewalk. They appeared again at the locked front gate.

  He finally got a good look at them. The men were dressed in what looked like vintage NASA space suits.

  In his eerily silent carriage house, Stewart McQueen distinctly heard the sound of a hacksaw.

  He did some rapid calculations.

  There was a gang of weird-suited spacemen at his gates, an angry android hiding out in his mansion and a pair of unstoppable assassins who could put fear into a metal heart skulking around his grounds.

  This was all suddenly sounding more like one of his books than he'd bargained for.

  His car was parked in a stall below his feet. A rear garage door opened on a private back road that wound through the woods and dumped out on a city access road behind his estate's high walls.

  Writer's block, deadlines and The New York Times bestseller list be damned. This was now about survival.

  The world-famous author spun from the window. Hobbling to beat the band, Stewart McQueen beat a hasty retreat down the back stairs of the darkened carriage house.

  Chapter 25

  The intense silence made it seem as if the dusty old mansion had been smothered in a ghostly fist. Although the thrumming electrical hum was gone, their eardrums still rang with the memory as Remo and Chiun crossed the threshold.

  Remo glanced up the stairs down which he'd come a few minutes before. "Big house," he commented. "He could be hiding anywhere."

  Chiun shook his head firmly. "Where would you go?" the old man demanded.

  Remo considered. "Probably the basement. The fuse box would be there. It'd be easier to connect there if he wanted to run the whole joint. But the way Gordons is, he could hook in at any point if he had to."

  Chiun was already breezing past him. "He will be in the basement," he insisted.

  "I was only saying that's where I'd go," Remo insisted as he trailed his teacher.

  "And you are different from an uncreative, unthinking robot in what way?" Chiun asked blandly.

  He whirled through the broken remnants of the basement door and ducked down the stairs.

  "Don't go on the rag with me just 'cause I'm not moving to Maine," Remo grumbled, following. Emergency lights on battery backups lit their way. In the basement Remo didn't comment on the remnants of broken wall or the twisted mechanical crocodile that lay atop the pile of bricks.

  They wound around the wooden stairs and headed past the idle furnace.

  The cellar beneath the mansion was huge.

  In one space off the main room, Remo saw what appeared to be Stewart McQueen's bedroom. There were bookcases, magazines, a TV and a small refrigerator.

  A double-wide coffin lined with dirt and shaded by a frilly overhanging canopy was the room's centerpiece. Twin feather pillows rested against the granite gravestone headboard.

  "Next time I think I should be reading more, remind me this is where my money goes," Remo said. Chiun didn't respond. His brow darkening, he held a slender finger to his papery lips. He cocked an ear forward.

  Remo had heard the sound, too.

  It was a soft metallic groan. The noise rose and fell, like a rusted bolt being unscrewed.

  Rounding a corner, the two men found the fuse box. Connected to its face was a pair of fat furry legs. The body to which the legs were attached was not visible. They extended through the air and disappeared around a corner. The granite archway into which they vanished opened into a dirt-lined tunnel.

  The legs had been spinning in order to unscrew from the fuse box. When Remo and Chiun rounded the corner, the appendages detached and flopped to the floor. Without seeming to be aware of the two Masters of Sinanju, they silently retracted, sliding back into the shadowed recesses of the loamy tunnel.

  Remo and Chiun trailed them to the stone arch. The long black legs slithered around the corner and disappeared.

  When Remo and Chiun stepped into the archway, the legs were already several yards away. They were being absorbed into the sides of a figure who stood at calm attention in the dark depths of the tunnel.

  Over the years Mr. Gordons had assumed many different forms and faces. The face he wore now was the first one they had ever seen on him. He was tall with sandy blond hair and wore a perpetual smile that was not quite a smile. His blue eyes were unblinking.

  When they appeared before him, the android didn't express a hint of surprise. As his long spider's legs rolled back into his human torso, he nodded to each man in turn.

  "High probability Remo, high probability Chiun. I would offer you a drink, but as it is likely that you intend to cause me bodily harm I have calculated as negligible the odds that you would accept such an offer."

  Remo's face was stone.

  "You got it wrong, metalman," he said icily as he stepped into the tunnel.

  A hint of something that, at least on a human face, might have passed for a frown touched Mr. Gordons's brow.

  "That is improbable," the android said. "Unless you have deviated from your previous pattern, you will attack me."

  "My son means that we do not intend to cause you mere bodily harm," Chiun explained, circling cautiously away from his pupil. Taking the cue, Remo moved the opposite way. "We intend to dismantle you piece by piece and bury your evil parts in the four corners of the Earth."

  The tunnel was wide enough that Remo and Chiun could move to opposite walls as they advanced on Gordons.

  With a final whirring snap, the android's spider arms stopped retracting. Each one of them five feet long, they remained jutting from beneath the armpits of his human arms.

  "Your statement is incorrect," Gordons said. As they walked toward him, he made not a move. "The Earth is roughly spherical in shape-therefore it has no corners. What is more, it is not I but the two of you who will cease to function this day."

  "Sez you," Remo challenged. "So how'd you get out of the volcano, tinman?"

  "My family freed me," the android replied simply.

  Remo had a mental image of a bunch of toasters and VCRs lowering a knotted bedsheet down into the Mexican volcano where they'd dumped Mr. Gordons.

  They were now only a few yards from the android. Remo kept as far from Chiun as possible. Difficult to do in such a confining space. Gordons seemed to realize their problem.

  "Your method of attack is flawed," Gordons pointed out. "By separating you think to divide my attentions. But this passage is not wide enough for your plan to succeed."

  The words had not passed his lips before he attacked.

  The two spider legs whizzed forward, re-forming as they came. By the time they reached Remo and Chiun, their furry tips had been transformed into metallic spearheads.

  Remo dropped below the deadly spear. As it brushed over his shoulder, he grabbed onto the shaft with one hand, snapping down with the other. With the side of his palm he severed a two-foot-long section of rigid leg.

  Ducking, Chiun mirrored his pupil's movements. When he shot back up he, too, had a spear in hand. Hissing sparks from their stumps, the injured legs curled back up to the android's chest.

  Remo tried to gauge the heft of the weapon in his hand. It was awkward to do. The leg was apparently constructed of the same frictionless material
Gordons had left at the scenes of his Florida crimes.

  "Use caution, Remo," Chiun warned. Ever alert, he kept his voice low as he advanced with his makeshift weapon. "He is not as he was when last we met."

  Remo, too, had noticed the speed. During their last encounter with Gordons, the android was a weakened version of his former self. But this seemed like the Gordons of old.

  Although Chiun's words were soft enough that only Remo should have heard, it was Mr. Gordons who replied.

  "The old one is correct," Mr. Gordons agreed. "With the introduction of supplementary data, my original program was altered over time. Due to the damage inflicted by the two of you I have decided to go back to my beginnings, reinstalling my original commands. What I once was, I am again."

  "You were a tin-plated asswipe," Remo suggested, raising his spear.

  Gordons flicked his metallic eyes to the younger Master of Sinanju. And in that sliver of a moment when his attention was diverted, Chiun let his missile fly.

  The spear whistled through the dank air, sinking deep into the android's head. A spray of white sparks spit from his face, peppering the dirt floor around his feet.

  Gordons reeled, spear jutting from between his eyes like a misshapen extra nose.

  It was only when he staggered to one side that they saw the second set of spider legs. Curled tightly, they had been hidden behind the android's back. Imminent danger provoked action.

  The spare legs shot out from his body. But rather than launch forward at Remo and Chiun, the spider legs plowed into the dirt walls of the tunnel, burrowing deep into earth.

  There came a muffled snap of old timber breaking. When the legs retracted, the walls seemed to come with them.

  With an ominous groan the tunnel began to collapse in on itself.

  As stone and dirt rained down on all their heads, Mr. Gordons fell away, staggering up the far end of the tunnel.