by Ron Goulart
“You’re losing feathers,” said Jana, close to Tad.
“Only a few. Most bird people do.”
“Be careful. Don’t bounce or wiggle any more than necessary.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
Bunner ventured up to the cottage door. “Let me try a few standard subduing tactics,” he said, placing an eye to the spyhole in the door. “My, six guards out cold and three more woozy.” From somewhere within his cloak he took a copper rod. “This gas, though not always, has a calming effect on him.”
“He’s of no use to us if he’s too subdued,” said Electro.
“We’ll hope for a satisfactory mean between crazed violence and doddering docility.” Bunner twisted the end of the rod and a yellowish mist went whispering into the cottage through the spyhole.
“Fifty percent of net! Growr!”
Tink!
“Ah, he’s not throwing them as far,” said Bunner, chuckling. “I do believe we’re making progress.”
A full minute went by with no further indication of violence from within the cottage.
Electro peered into the spyhole. “He’s plopped down in a chair, tuning his guitar.”
“Splendid.” The supervisor pulled out a multikey and inserted it into the multilock on the thick door.
Tad, after a quick glance at Taine, put an arm around Jana’s shoulders. “Hold back until we’re sure it’s safe.”
“Good evening, Hamfixin.” Bunner took a few steps into the place.
“Evenin to yer,” said the large black man seated in the synskin chair with a twelve string-guitar resting on his knee.
Four guards were still standing, several more were strewn on the padded floor or draped over the simple furniture.
“Done been thinkin,” said Hamfixin, huge fingers resting on the guitar strings. “Been done thinkin bout how I uster work on that cabbage farm when I weren’t no more higher than a snerg’s belly button an one day my old mam done—”
“Whoa,” said Electro. “We should be catching all this. Could you curb your recollections till we have our equipment set up, Mr. Hamfixin?”
“Who are this whiskery joker?” the singer asked Bunner.
“Why, this is Dr. Martin G. Brattle, come all this way to record you and your marvelous music.”
“Ugly motherfuyer, ain’t he? Remind me of a joker I done killed back when I was picking garbanzos down in the delta country round—”
“Save the memoirs until my associate is ready for you. Harvey, let’s get cracking.”
“Yes, at once.” Tad left Jana, came into the room and placed the recording box on the floor near Hamfixin’s chair.
“Who am this dude with all the plumage?”
“I’m Harvey Conn-Hedison, Dr. Brattle’s devoted aid.”
“Asswarmer,” said Hamfixin. “You know, I done been all over this planet an I been down so low sometime as I hadder look up at—”
“Are we getting this now, Harvey?”
“Everything is functioning, doctor.”
“Good, good. Then you can go ahead, Mr. Hamfixin.” Electro circled the room until he was close to Tad. He whispered, “When all these nitwits are in here I’ll stun the lot. Then we hightail it for the Ad Building.”
“I’m ready.” He turned to summon Jana in from outside and noticed she was talking to her husband. “Marcia, can you get over here, please.”
“Yes, of course, Harvey.” The girl entered, came to Tad. “What?”
“How come you’re talking to—”
“I couldn’t very well avoid it without making everybody suspicious.”
“When everyone’s in here, Electro’ll stun them. Then we move.”
“Okay.” She returned to the doorway. “Do come in, Mr. Taine. You too, Mr. Hohl.”
“The door ought to be shut,” said Bunner. “You do have a tendency to escape, Hamfixin. You’re quite footloose.”
“I is as footloose as a snickerbug hoppin on a—”
“Suppose you start with one of your blues tunes?” Electro, once Hohl and Taine were inside, shut the heavy door. He remained with his back to it.
“You alls the time is talkin over my talkin, motherhumper,” said Hamfixin. “Got me in mind of a joker I cut up whiles I was plucking dummler beans on a plantation long ways from here. That was when I done made up my ‘Nineteen Sacks A Day Quota Or They Gone Bust Your Ass Blues.’ I believes I do that one right now.” The fingers of his left hand pressed down on the strings, his right hand commenced strumming. “Woke up this morning with them ol dummler bean bugs nibblin on my—”
“Could you wait a second, Mr. Hamfixin,” said Electro. “I’m not absolutely certain our recording box is working. Harvey, cart it over here. You come have a look as well, Marcia.”
Tad was bending for the box when Hamfixin leaped from his chair.
“Growr!” cried the black man. “It ain’t bad enough you interrupt my bio, it ain’t bad enough you step on my patter . . . you got to interrupt my musical narratives also! I gonna kill you, you ugly motherfuyer! Gonna kill you graveyard dead!” He flung aside his guitar.
The instrument whacked Tad across the bridge of the nose before continuing across the room to land among fallen guards.
“Temper, temper,” warned the supervisor, reaching for his superduing rod once more.
“Gonna pull them ugly whiskers out by they roots!” Hamfixin lunged at Electro.
The robot was swinging up a hand. “I have to warn you that—”
“Never did done like a man with facefuzz since the time . . . well, I’ll be dipped!” Hamfixin stumbled back from Electro, glancing from the robot’s exposed metal chin to the full beard he was clutching in his hand.
“The robot!” bellowed Hohl. “It’s the nerfing robot!”
Chapter 27
“Then it’s obvious who you must be!” Taine lunged for Jana.
All at once there was nothing else in the room except that charging figure. “You aren’t going to hurt her!” Tad tackled the girl’s husband.
Taine swung down with both fists clasped, striking Tad hard against the side of his head. “So you’re the one. The bastard she ran off with this time.”
Tad held on, succeeded in pitching Taine over onto the padded floor. He let go, dived for the lean man’s torso. He got one hand around Taine’s throat, struck at him with the other.
Taine twisted, brought his knees up into Tad’s groin. “She won’t stay. She’ll run. She always does.”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” He jabbed his fist into Taine’s face. Twice, three times. Again.
Finally, he realized the man was unconscious beneath him. He took a deep breath, lifted up and away from him.
“Look out!” warned Jana’s voice.
Tad spun, saw Hohl hurtling at him.
“Feathered little freak!” shouted the overseer. “I’ll stomp your nerfing head into—”
“Not yet.” Pivoting, Tad dodged the charge. He drove a fist into the passing Hohl’s stomach.
“Foul me, will you? A man with multiple allergies!” Hohl growled, leaping for Tad.
This time he couldn’t dodge.
Hohl’s body hit him and they both slammed back into the wall. “Teach you to skip out!” He pummeled Tad with both fists.
“I don’t like you, Hohl,” said Tad, feeling the remark wasn’t quite strong enough. He struggled to avoid the overseer’s blows. But it was impossible. The air was being slammed out of him, pain was zigzagging through his body.
Zzizle!
“Yow!” Hohl screamed, brought both hands up to the sides of his head.
Zzang!
Hohl howled. Danced back away from Tad. Tripped over someone, fell backwards. Let go his head, flapped his arms. Dropped unconscious, flat on his back. Next to the unconscious form of Supervisor Bunner.
Tad held onto the wall with one hand. “Thanks.”
“If you persist in fighting fair, my boy, you’re going to continue to have difficul
ties.” Electro stood in the center of the room, casually rubbing the tips of his metal fingers together. “Although you didn’t handle things too badly.”
Only Tad and the robot and Jana remained upright. Everyone else was distributed somewhere on the floor of the maximum security cottage. The guards, Supervisor Bunner, Jana’s husband, Hohl and even Hamfixin.
“I lost track of what was going on,” said Tad, still bracing himself against the wall. “When I saw Taine going for you, Jana, I—”
“Yes, I know. I saw.” She wended her way through the stunned bodies to him.
“Very old-fashioned approach you have, my boy, very organic,” remarked Electro. “But then you don’t come equipped with stunguns, subduing mist and—”
“We aren’t going to have much time,” Tad cut in. “We better get to the Administration Building.”
“You’re absolutely right.” Electro stepped over a sprawled guard, rolled over another and stooped. He retrieved his beard, slapped it back on his face. “Hardly as convincing as it might be, but I trust sufficient to get by on a dark night.”
“You haven’t lost too many feathers,” Jana told Tad, putting an arm around him. “Let me help you walk.”
He shook his head, which made his new headache worse. “I’m going to have to walk into that place unaided, otherwise it’ll make people suspicious.”
Electro, avoiding the scattered bodies as much as possible, tromped to the door and opened it a fraction. “Apparently everyone is used to sounds of violence from this joint. No one is lurking outside. Shall we depart?”
“Yeah, let’s go.” Tad moved free of the girl, managed to walk across the room and out into the night.
“A most sentimental man, your Supervisor Bunner,” Electro was saying to the two guards and the assistant supervisor who stood on the stone steps of the Administration Building.
“What do you mean, Dr. Brattle?” asked the assistant supervisor, a small near-sighted lizard man.
“I mean the fellow insisted on remaining in Hamfixin’s cottage while the singer ran through his entire repertoire of ditties about mother and fireside. Extremely touching.”
“Meantime,” said Tad, “he told us we might use his office to go over the material we’ve recorded.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s all right.”
“Fishy,” commented one of the guards.
“Fishy,” echoed the other guard.
Electro, very gingerly, stroked his beard and gazed at the two burly catmen. “Are you hinting at some lack of truth in my account of Mr. Bunner’s nocturnal activities?”
“Sounds like so much bushwah,” said one guard.
“Lot of horsepuckey,” added the other.
“Unfortunate.” Electro raised the middle finger of his right hand. A line of pale orange light shot out of it, hitting the chest of first one guard and then the other.
While they were dropping to their knees the beam touched the assistant supervisor and he, too, toppled.
“When verbal stratagems fail, my boy, resort to gadgets.” Electro frisked the keys off one of the guards, unlocked the doors. “Assist me in dragging these skeptics inside and out of sight.”
Chapter 28
“We can bring this off with a distinct flourish,” announced Electro. He stood in the center of the control room, arms spread wide. “Yes, a flourish is what is called for.”
Two of the large room’s walls were covered with monitor screens which showed sections of the plantation grounds as well as the interiors of the barracks and warehouses.
Tad was at a row of data boxes. “Here’s what we want,” he said, easing a faxprint out of a box slot. “This thing just printed the locations of everyone we want. My father is in Barracks B, Cousin Cosmo is in C, Cousin Alice is in E and, Jana, your dad is in Barracks C, too.”
The girl nodded, watching the robot. “What is it you have in mind, Electro?”
“I’ve concluded Blackwatch has been in business quite long enough.” He crossed to the wall which was devoted to control panels, dials, levers, switches. “The first step in my overall plan calls for. . . .” He reached out, flipped a sequence of six toggles. “That takes care of all the day-shift guards, who are tucked away in the personnel compound.” He cocked a thumb at a row of monitor screens. “We’ve just sealed all the doors on their quarters. No one can get out until these switches are switched. Now then. . . .” He unhooked a microphone. “Public address . . . let’s make sure I’ve got Bunner’s syrupy voice down pat. Sound about right?”
“Perfect,” said the girl, “but—”
“Urgent! Urgent!” Electro said into the mike. “All night shift guards will leave their posts at once and report to the personnel compound auditorium. Urgent! Urgent!”
While the robot repeated the message Tad studied the picture screens. He saw guards, some with puzzled expressions, running out of the barracks buildings and away from the gates, running toward the auditorium.
“The gathering place will be seen on screens twenty-six through thirty,” said Electro. “Let me know, my dear, when they’ve all obligingly trooped in there.”
“Good seats are filling up fast,” Jana said.
Electro folded his massive arms, whistled a fragment of a sea chanty. “About ready?”
“A few stragglers,” said Tad.
The robot resumed his whistling.
“They’re all inside,” said Jana.
“Very well then.” Electro threw five new switches. “They’re locked in the auditorium for the night.” He twisted two dials, flipped a toggle. “And so they won’t be bored I’m screening some films of Supervisor Bunner’s recent vacation to the Murdstone Abysmal Caverns for them.”
“Can we head for the barracks now?” asked Tad.
“I’m not through flourishing, my boy.” Clutching the mike, Electro made a further announcement. “All field-hands will now rise, dress and leave their barracks to rally in front of the Administration Building. At once, on the double.” He replaced the microphone, fiddled with more dials and switches. “That should open all the barracks, ladies and gents.”
Jana asked, “You’re freeing everybody?”
“The only fair-minded way to handle the situation.”
“Guess you’re right.” The girl laughed.
“Come on.” Tad hurried toward the exit. “I want to get down there and meet my dad at Barracks B. Jana.”
“Coming.” She caught up with him.
“Run along, children,” said Electro. “I have a few more touches to apply.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Well . . . I came . . . to free you . . . to rescue you.”
“You still haven’t gotten over that stammer. You had it when you were eleven and you still have it at seventeen.”
“I’m . . . I’m nineteen, dad . . . and I don’t . . . stammer.”
“You’re stammering right now, Tad. It’s one of the most annoying things you do, that and arguing with me.”
“I haven’t seen you for . . . for six years. Damn it. I thought . . . thought you were dead.”
“Obviously I’m not.”
The workers were flowing around them. Tad had spotted his father coming out of the barracks building and run up to him.
Daniel Rhymer was a tall man, gaunt now, his skin sundried and brown. His hair was short-cropped, touched with gray. “It never occurred to you I might have an escape plan of my own worked out?” Tad’s father asked him. “We’ve been working on a tunnel out of here for nearly three years. In a matter of weeks we’d have had it finished and then—”
“Listen to me!” Tad stepped forward, gripped his father’s shoulders. They felt lean and bony through the rough-spun field-hand tunic. “Listen to me, dad. I’m not the kid you knew and I won’t let you talk to me this way anymore. We thought you were dead, but then I learned you weren’t. So I came halfway across this goddamn planet to get you free of here. Mom is dead and you’re all I have left. But
if you try to act with me the way you used to I’ll leave you here and you can dig your tunnel bare handed until you die, for all I care.”
His father lowered his eyes. “I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know she was dead,” he said. “When?”
“Three months ago.”
His father said, “How’d you manage to bring this off, Tad?”
“With help. A robot named Electro and a girl named Jana Taine. The three of us.”
“Only three?”
“Well, we work pretty well together. And Electro’s an exceptional robot, Cousin Cosmo built him originally and I repaired him.”
“Yes, I remember Electro,” said Tad’s father. He moved back from his son. “You’re taller.”
“And older.”
“All right.” He held out his hand. “I’ll try to . . . change. I’ll try to like you, Tad. I can’t promise . . . but I’ll try.”
Seconds passed, a half a minute. Tad held out his hand. “Right now we have to settle with Cousin Joshua.” He shook hands with his father.
Chapter 29
Light was flowing out of the open doorways of the Administration Building, freed laborers were roaming the grounds, milling, wandering. Tad, a few paces behind his father, was heading for there.
Electro’s voice came booming out of all the plantation loudspeakers. “We are running shuttles away from Blackwatch, commencing in one half hour. Plantation landvans will be utilized. Report to Cosmo Rhymer in the warehouse area at once to make arrangements.”
Immediately dozens of the liberated prisoners started moving for the warehouses.
“Typical of Cosmo,” Tad’s father said over his shoulder, “taking charge.”
They were approaching the staircase of the Administration Building. “Actually it’s Electro who’s taken charge, he’s got Cousin Cosmo working for him.”
A moderate clanging sounded inside the corridor. “My boy, I have a chore . . . Ah, good to see you again, Mr. Rhymer,” the robot said. “You’re looking fit, all things considered.” Electro trotted up to them.
“Fit? I’ve lost twenty-six—”
“You’ll find a bit of a reunion in progress in Bunner’s late office,” Electro went on. “Alice is there as well as Jana and her father. Cosmo will be there once he gets the evacuation plans solidified.”
