Surfing Samurai Robots

by Mel Gilden

  ‘Is he right about these people?’

  ‘Who knows? The world is full of industrial spies.’

  ‘And fear is real, even if you only imagine you’re afraid. Maybe it’s not just his imagination.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that industrial spies who didn’t know Mr Daise very well might think that trading Heavenly for a secret or two was a good idea.’

  She stopped walking and looked at me through narrow eyes. Sunlight glinted off them, made them look like diamond chips. ‘That’s a nasty idea.’

  ‘So far it’s just a nasty idea.’

  She nodded and pushed through a revolving door into the first building. Once through the door we were standing on a wide ledge overlooking a complicated and convincing seashore. Gulls wheeled in a painted sky over water that washed in waves over rocks and then receded. I couldn’t see where the water receded to. Hard-looking green in-covered the rugged rocks where crabs no bigger than my fist marched carefully, as if stepping over bodies. In the pools between the rocks colourful tentacles swayed. The place even smelled like the ocean.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ I said.

  ‘Tidal pools are Mr Daise’s hobby.’

  ‘More than a hobby. What do you know about a room at the SSR building where Mr Daise hides in the dark behind a pane of what is very probably bulletproof glass?’

  ‘Not much. He interviewed me there a few times before he hired me.’

  The gulls, suspended on updrafts, flew down to have a look at us. They cried insults and floated back to the ceiling, where they wheeled again.

  I said, ‘When’s the last time you actually saw Mr Daise?’

  Sylvia bit her lip but continued to watch the birds. After a long time, she said, ‘It’s been at least a month. I could check in my diary.’

  ‘Is it unusual for him to be out of sight for so long?’

  ‘Not very. Mr Daise has an apartment at the SSR building, and he is not much of a party animal. Nothing could have happened to him. You just talked to him this morning.’

  ‘I talked to a voice behind a dark piece of glass. You or the robotler were told about me by a voice over the phone.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning somebody may be collecting people named Daise.’

  ‘If that’s the case, Mr Marlowe, I hope you’re a very good detective.’ Before waiting for an answer, she turned suddenly and put her hand on the revolving door. ‘Come on. I’ll show you Heavenly’s zoo, if you still want to see it.’

  Chapter 12

  The Money In Sagging Flesh

  SYLVIA WOODS marched to the next building, passing roses and fountains as if they were just flowers and water. I followed, hurrying to catch up with the swaying butt and the pistoning arms. The cosy atmosphere was gone. I was a guy with nasty ideas, and that made me a nasty guy.

  So far I, had nothing much to chew on. If I went back to Malibu now, I’d stay there watching TV and inhaling strange smoke. Sylvia had to know more than she was telling. If she didn’t, or she would not tell me, I would not only have to be a great detective, I would have to be a magician. I was neither.

  I caught up with Sylvia and said, ‘Look, I didn’t kidnap them.’ I had to jog to keep up with her.

  She didn’t look at me. ‘There hasn’t been a ransom note. Maybe they weren’t kidnapped.’ Her voice was hard as bathroom tile and just as cold.

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But wouldn’t it be nice if we knew for sure?’

  I was about three seconds behind her when she pushed through another revolving door. By the time I got into the building she looked like a different person, or anyway, like the person I’d been talking to in the library. She was facing me and smiling shyly as if she were about to ask me to dance. ‘You’re right, Zoot, I guess I’m just a little upset.’ Her voice echoed while she pushed her glasses up her nose.

  I said, ‘Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,’ but I was looking at the room we were standing in. I couldn’t help myself. It was an unusual room.

  It was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside, and the outside looked enormous. Down the centre of the room, row on row of laboratory tables and equipment stretched to the far end. On the tables were enamel pans and shiny tools delicate enough to clean under a flea’s fingernails. One of the tables had a lot of flasks and beakers connected by twisted glass tubes.

  The equipment between the tables was big and many-piped. A heat dissipator circled the thick round body of each piece, its mirror surface reflecting me in a way that did not improve my looks. At the foot of each were a computer terminal and a chair made of black leather and chrome. Along the walls were aquarium tanks, each bubbling merrily. On shelves over them were hundreds of cages, stacked like high-rise apartments nearly to the ceiling. Some kind of metal scaffolding was built against the cages.

  There were fish in the tanks and animals in the cages. Sylvia and I didn’t concern the fish, but the animals began to move around and make noise. Some of them pawed the bars of their cages while they yipped pleadingly. They all looked at us with big haunted eyes.

  The animals filled the room with a terrible smell. It had a solid presence, like a big animal itself, one that could not be ignored. It had all the worst features of every bad smell I had met on Earth. Next to it, cigarette smoke was a spring morning. Burning week old grease was a day in the country. You could send that smell out to the cleaners but when you got it back it would smell just the same.

  ‘Some zoo,’ I said. ‘What goes on here?’

  ‘This is where Heavenly did her experiments.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Are you sure you want to know?’

  I wasn’t. I said, ‘Yes.’

  She put a finger to a cheek and crinkled her eyes as she walked across the dull black floor. I followed her with my eyes. This room was a lot nastier than any thought I’d had to date. She rode a metal frame along the scaffolding to a particular place on the wall, and then the frame travelled up the scaffolding like an elevator with her inside it.

  Dogs, cats, and birds ran around inside their cages in circles, then looked through their bars and called out to her. A monkey put out his hand and was actually close enough to touch her with one finger. She shrank back, hurriedly found the cage she was looking for, and rode the frame back to the floor. She lugged the cage back to the laboratory table nearest me.

  ‘Here’s one you’ll like,’ Sylvia said.

  A dog stood in the centre of the cage wagging its tail and barking at us. Each bark had a little cry at the end.

  I said, ‘It’s just a dog.’

  ‘Silly you,’ Sylvia said. ‘It used to be a cat.’

  ‘Huh?’ She had surprised me. That grunt was the best I could do.

  ‘Huh, yourself. It used to be a cat. Heavenly genetically altered it to make it a dog.’

  I whistled low through my teeth.

  ‘I also have an archaeopteryx that used to be a parakeet.’

  ‘I can only assume that an archaeopteryx and a parakeet are not the same thing.’

  ‘Not hardly.’

  She showed me the archaeopteryx — a big winged thing that was as much lizard as bird. After that she showed me another dog — this one living in drifts of its own dandruff— a macaw with a bobbed beak, and a pigeon with a great set of boobs. Sylvia said they were great boobs. I had no opinion. Females on T’toom don’t have them.

  ‘What, exactly, was Heavenly trying to prove here?’

  ‘I told you. She was into genetic manipulation. Among other things, she wanted to cure a lot of common complaints — dandruff, acne, warts, sagging flesh.’ ‘Any money in sagging flesh?’ ‘Yes, but that wouldn’t matter to Heavenly. She was — is — a humanitarian.’

  ‘All right. Say she is. How was she doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m her social secretary, not her lab assistant.’

  ‘I said all right. I’m sorry I took a poke at her. She doesn’t care a thing ab
out money. Could anybody else make sense of this stuff?’ I nodded at the laboratory.

  Sylvia sighed. She was tired of fighting me. ‘I don’t think so. I guess she kept notes, but I don’t know where they’d be.’

  ‘Heavenly could be a big help finding them.’

  ‘Nasty,’ Sylvia said.

  I nodded. We went back outside, and I breathed deeply. As we strolled along a gravel path in one of the formal gardens, I said,’Who takes care of these animals?’

  Together, we said, ‘Robots.’

  I nodded and said, ‘I’ll bet the noses on their faces are just for show.’

  Not long after that we were sitting on a cold stone bench watching water tumble down cement seashells of increasing size into a tub big enough for Whipper Will and all his friends to surf in. The sun was going down through the trees. Birds were singing. Flashy flowers perfumed the air. All was right with the world except at least one person was missing, maybe two, and my friends were short some surf-bots. Not too bad for this evil old world, but bad enough. I was thinking alternately about where I might go next and about how cold the bench was.

  Sylvia adjusted her glasses and said, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘Novelty night.’

  ‘Are you always that clever after a hard day’s detecting?’

  ‘Sorry. Reflex. You’ve been thinking.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking. I don’t know where Heavenly went, but I know her hangs. Maybe one of her friends will know where she went. Maybe she’ll show up herself.’

  I shook my head and grumbled, ‘English.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Let’s go.’

  The garage was a big empty barn. I think bats lived in the rafters. Maybe a bum lived in one of the corners. He was safe unless somebody mounted a major expedition. The only car parked on the vast expanse of oil-dotted concrete was a small blue boxy job that Sylvia unlocked and let me into.

  She pushed a button on the dash, and the garage door opened. I looked back as we drove out Franklin and saw that the door was closing again all on its own.

  I said, ‘Who owns the car parked in front?’ ‘It’s one of Heavenly’s. A present from her father. But she never drove it much. She preferred a Porsche she bought herself.’

  ‘Herself?’

  ‘With the allowance Mr Daise gave her. Do these questions mean anything?’

  ‘Probably not. Not right now, anyway.’

  My guts were trying to tell me something. And not just that they hadn’t particularly enjoyed lunch. I simmered for a few seconds and turned to look behind us again. There was a car back there. It was an off-green car that was new about the time Philip Marlowe took his first case. ‘Slow down,’ I said.

  ‘Backseat driver?’ ‘What? Slow down. I think somebody’s following us, and I want to get a look at them.’

  Sylvia nodded, and she turned right at a little residential street that jutted at an angle to La Brea. The car rolled slowly along as if Sylvia and I were looking for an address. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the off-green car had just turned the corner and was trundling about a half block behind us. ‘Stop the car.’ We double-parked almost at the next corner. The slow-moving car waited behind us for a second or two, then, not to be conspicuous, it drifted around us like a leaf around a rock in a stream. Sylvia and I both got a good look at who was in the car following us. Three gorillas in suits.

  I said, ‘You ever see them before?’ ‘Who knows? All gorillas look alike to me.’

  ‘Sure. But three gorillas driving a car and wearing suits? I think those are the same three I played pattycake with this morning at the SSR building.’ I pretended to think for a moment, but nothing useful bubbled to the surface. I said, ‘Let’s get going. They’ll come around again in a minute.’

  Sylvia turned a couple of corners, and we were back on La Brea, heading south past gaudy little joints selling anything you could ever want. But if you were smart, you wouldn’t want to get it in any of those places. Traffic was heavy, and there was not much room to manoeuvre. Neither of us spoke. I couldn’t help checking behind us now and then, and finally the sore neck I was getting paid off.

  ‘There they are,’ I said.

  Sylvia shook her head at the going-home commute traffic that surrounded us. She said, ‘And us with no place to go.’

  Chapter 13

  Hangs

  By sweating a little and getting horns blown at it, the off-green car squeezed closer to us. By the time we got to Beverly, it was two cars behind us, where it seemed as comfortable as a babe in a cradle.

  The light was green, but we waited for three cars to finish making illegal left turns before we rolled forward at a hesitant clip only slightly faster than I can walk. Our tail stayed two cars behind us.

  Nervously, Sylvia said, ‘We could stop and see what they want.’

  ‘We could dance the tarantella on the roof of their car too. It would tell us as much. If they wanted to talk, they wouldn’t have gone around us up in Hollywood.’

  ‘What then?’ The worry in her eyes was not there because of the traffic.

  ‘They’re just following us to see where we go. Make it difficult.’

  ‘Make it—’ Sylvia stopped talking suddenly. ‘OK.’ She hunched over the wheel, full of resolve.

  Sylvia didn’t break any traffic laws, but she also didn’t make any friends as she got over to the right-hand lane and went west on Third to a cross street that was called Martel on one side of the thoroughfare and Hauser on the other.

  ‘Los Angeles streets,’ I said and shook my head.

  ‘A little game for the relatives visiting from back east,’ Sylvia turned the car on to Hauser. It was a broad street lined with identical tall white buildings, each with a small fringe of lawn around it and lots of parking spaces. The street doglegged, and smaller streets branched off to the side. The tall white buildings surrounded us like the walls of a maze. The off-green car turned on to Hauser.

  Sylvia turned up one of the smaller streets, and I could see that it branched again further on. I was lost already. ‘What kind of a place is this?’ I said.

  ‘La Brea Towers,’ she said without looking at me. ‘People get lost in here all the time.’ She turned right at a traffic circle, went around two streets, and up the third.

  ‘Unusual way to get tenants. I don’t see the gorillas.’

  Sylvia turned again, and we circled one of the big buildings. A cream-coloured Cadillac was letting a spry white-haired woman off under a long green awning. We kept circling and found our way to Fairfax, where we stopped for a red light. I looked across the asphalt playing field of a school on the corner and saw the green car, or one like it, nosing out between two of the apartment buildings.

  ‘Hit it,’I said.

  Sylvia turned right, causing a car going northbound on Fairfax to skid and honk at us as it stopped too quickly. ‘I hate people who drive like idiots,’ she said, ‘especially when they’re me.’

  We made our way through darkening side streets, where in nice houses people were getting ready for dinner in rooms full of homey yellow light. At Olympic, Sylvia sighed and turned west. ‘How was that?’ she said.

  ‘Pretty slick,’ I said. ‘I hope those gorillas are as lost as I am.’

  We played stop-and-go all down Olympic until Sylvia turned into a crowded parking structure behind an enclosed arcade big enough to be the packing crate for a small city. People were still going home, not shopping, and we found a parking place pretty quick. After Sylvia turned off the engine we sat watching cars circle through the dim cement cavern looking for that perfect parking spot. I could hear Sylvia breathing. I could smell her, too. She smelled good. I was back in the Daise formal garden.

  We rested until Sylvia said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, Heavenly didn’t hang in the car park, did she?’

  Sylvia almost laughed. We left the car and walked through the parking structure to the arcade, gathering glances from curious shopp
ers. Cars roared in the enclosed space like rolling thunder. A green car full of gorillas would be nothing special. It would sound like that too.

  The arcade in Malibu would have been a wart on the neck of the one we were walking through now. The place was at least five stories high and disappeared into the misty distance, I wouldn’t have been able to see the far end anyway because of the cute sculptures sprawling down the centre of the promenade. I wondered if the place had its own weather.

  Fairy music that came from everywhere and nowhere floated on the air with the smells of popcorn and Mexican food and new shoe leather. It made a heady mix with the vague echoes of moving, talking shoppers.

  ‘Why is everything air-conditioned within an inch of its life?’ I said. My nose was numbing up again.

  ‘It’s kind of a status thing.’

  ‘I get it. The colder you are, the more money you have.’ A bull of a man in a ridiculous red uniform was watching us from his station in front of a bank of private elevators. As we walked on, I said, ‘People live here?’

  ‘Live and work both.’

  ‘Is there an undertaker?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so. It wouldn’t fit the mood. Not unless he could have tiny white lights blinking in his window and he could sell popcorn on the side. Too bad, though. An undertaker in the arcade would be a great selling point. You’d never have to go outside.’

  We went up a flight in a glass elevator inside a clock that showed its gears working and walked down to a bookstore called Nurture/Nature. The front of the store was panelled in rustic wood. We entered through a wide doorway over which two very complicated and artistic Ns were burned, intertwining, into the wood.

  Inside, the bookstore continued the outdoorsy theme. It busted a gut trying to look as if the entire inside were outside. Bookshelves seemed hewn from fallen trees. The ceiling was painted a cloud-flecked blue. Autumn leaves and pine needles were painted on the brown floor. Guitar music played softly but persistently against the aggressively jaunty music that managed to get in through the open door. Whoever owned the shop had missed out making the place smell like pine needles, but nobody’s perfect.