Strange Robby

by Selina Rosen

  "I didn't think there was anything wrong with our old life," Laura said. "I liked having someplace to go, people depending on me. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment. Here I have no sense of purpose. It's like, what do I do? I live. That's all I do."

  Tommy nodded. He knew she was unhappy. "Don't you see, Honey?" he said gently. "Everyone pushes us into believing that we must accomplish something. That each of us has a specific reason for being. Some task we must spend a lifetime discovering and performing. That somehow this something will make us distinct individuals in the world. But the truth is that our only real reason for being is just to be, and very few men change the world enough that they are remembered after they die."

  "But we all try. That's what makes us humans," Laura said.

  "That's what makes us crazy," Tommy said with a laugh. He stood up, picked up the squirrel and the bucket of water and left.

  Laura stared back into the water. Sometimes he made no sense at all.

  When Spider woke up she realized that, although it must be daylight outside, the sun was not streaking in on her. She sat up and looked at the shades pulled down on all the windows. Robby had taken regular window shades, adapted them, and screwed them to the roof of the car. He'd fixed the front seats so that when they laid back they met the back seat, making one large bed. Then he'd taken a piece of foam rubber to shove between the two front seats. He'd apparently counted on them having to live in the car. She looked around, and when she didn't see the scientist she shook Robby awake.

  "Wha . . . what?" He rubbed his eyes.

  "Where's the woman?" Spider asked.

  "In the trunk," Robby said sleepily.

  Spider laughed and lay back down.

  Robby yawned and stretched. He looked at his watch. "It's ten o'clock. I guess we better hit the road."

  "Oh, how glorious it is to know what time it is," Spider said stretching herself. "Funny how you can miss such a tiny thing."

  "You look like hell," Robby said.

  "Well, thank you very much," Spider laughed.

  "What are the burn marks from?"

  "That damn lightning bolt gun I suppose," Spider said. She looked down at what he was talking about and saw scorched marks on both her pajamas and her skin. She wished he hadn't pointed it out, because now it hurt.

  "You can wear some of my clothes for now, but I don't have many. You'll need clothes, and so will the boy. I've still got some of the money you sent me."

  Spider nodded. "Good." She got out of the car. She covered Mark up better and then closed the door. Then she walked over to the folding camp table and sat down. For the first time she really noticed the boxes sitting around the camp. They were intriguing.

  Robby followed her and started stirring the fire, then he threw on some wood and hit it with some power.

  "So, what's all this then?" Spider asked indicating the boxes.

  Robby started to tell her. He opened one and showed it to her. "This is my bath box. See, you open it and here's your sink." He pointed to a square pan in one corner. "It has separate partitions for your soap, shampoo, toothpaste, and shaving stuff. Then you have this." He pulled a hose from the box. "The shower." He pulled another hose out the side of the box. "You stick this end into some water, flip this switch here—it's battery operated—and it pumps water up through this hose, and you take a shower."

  He closed the box back up and grabbed another. "This one I call the cook box. See, you open it like this. Here's your one-burner Coleman stove. The top is a spice rack, and here's where your pots and pans go."

  He closed it up and grabbed another. "This is the food box. It just has different compartments for different food. But see in this corner I have built a small, butane-run refrigerator. One bottle will last about a month. It's perfectly safe and will keep a six-pack of soda and several packets of lunchmeat cool. Vents on the back allow the heat to escape. You just have to be careful you pack it with the vents clear."

  He closed it, turned it around, put it down and picked up another box. "This is the light box. So called because it holds . . . " he opened it and pulled a lantern out " . . . a light! It's fluid. It keeps it from getting beat up in the back mostly." He closed it and set it down. "I made the table and chair thing, too. It folds down into a box. All of the boxes have been painted in bright, weather resistant colors, and all boxes are completely waterproof. You can stack them together, strap them with these straps, pull out that wheel, and cart it wherever you need to take it, or . . . This custom-made set fits neatly and completely into the trunk of a Hyundai when there isn't a woman in there." Robby smiled.

  Spider laughed. "Hey! I'm sold! You ever think of patenting them? Making them, selling them. There's bound to be a market."

  Robby shrugged. "I have lots of ideas. Problem is that it takes money to do things like that, and all my money was always tied up. So was my time. I couldn't justify spending time and money on something that might or might not make us money."

  "Well, you're very inventive, Robby. I'm surprised, I mean up till now I just thought you were your typical run of the mill Fry Guy," Spider said.

  Robby laughed. "Well shucks, ma'am, you're makin' me blush." He quit laughing then and looked serious. "What do we do now, Spider?"

  "We hide until we figure out just what we can do."

  The SWTF were everywhere. Outside her house. Outside her office. They followed her to work. They followed her to lunch. She wasn't surprised at all when Deacon showed up at her office door.

  "Come in and take a load off, Mr. Deacon," Carrie said without looking up. "I see that I have become the object of your attention again."

  Deacon sat down, and she finally looked at him.

  "You look like hell," he said without any malice.

  "Thanks to you and your people I feel like I'm living in hell," she said. "Please make your point and leave. I'm a very busy woman."

  "Fine, I'll make this brief. If you see your lover, it would be in everybody's best interest for you to call me immediately."

  Carrie looked back down at her papers to disguise the look on her face. Till right then she hadn't been at all sure that Spider was alive, much less free. "I'm not likely to see her, and we all know I wouldn't turn her in if I did. So, if that's all you have to say . . . "

  "It's not." Deacon cleared his throat, so she looked at him again. "This guy she's protecting—the guy that's with her. He's dangerous. He needs to be stopped. You have no idea what this guy can do."

  "But you're wrong. I've got a pretty good idea. If you're not going to try to kill or kidnap me, then I suggest you take a hike, because it will be a cold day in hell when I help you."

  Deacon got up and started to leave, but he turned in the door. "You have no idea what you are protecting, DA Long. No idea at all."

  "And I think you have no idea what you're protecting."

  Robby stayed in the car with the prisoner while Spider and the boy went into Wal-Mart to shop. When Robby protested that the boy was wearing only white pajamas, she ripped the bottom off Francis' black skirt and tied it around his waist.

  "There, now if anyone asks, I just picked him up from judo practice," Spider told Robby. Robby laughed and shrugged. He hoped she knew what she was doing.

  Spider had put a push on Francis, and she sat in the back seat as if there were no place on earth she would have rather been.

  It was taking them longer than it would have taken Robby, and he was getting bored.

  "So, Franny," Robby started. "Just what made the government decide to build people?"

  "Oh, it wasn't us," Francis said. "They started it."

  "They, who?"

  "The aliens. They found the suitable female candidates and impregnated them. Then there were the Germans . . . "

  "Germans!" Robby shrieked.

  "Oh, yes, they were the first ones to have absolute proof that the world was being visited by aliens. You see, the Germans found a downed spacecraft. That's how they found out how to make rockets an
d how they learned what the aliens had been doing. Then they decided to start their own breeding programs. They found the half-breeds the aliens had made and removed the chips the aliens were using to track them. Then they harvested the eggs and sperm and put the embryos into willing German female volunteers. With technology gleaned from the alien ship, the Germans were able to develop test-tube breeding at least fifty years before anyone else even started to investigate the prospect.

  "When the US took over the German bases after WWII, they found hundreds of subjects that the Germans had bred, all blond-haired, blue-eyed, and all carrying alien DNA. That was their 'master race.' Of course, the subjects had been horribly brain washed from birth, and were so dangerous that they had to be destroyed, but we didn't destroy the data. Once we knew that the aliens existed, and that they really were experimenting on us, it wasn't that hard to find some of their off-spring. Using the captured research, and in some instances, the actual German scientists, we started our own breeding program here in the States . . . "

  "But why?" Robby asked. "I don't understand. Why would you want to do that?"

  "Because the aliens are out there. They're out there, and why do you think they're experimenting on us?"

  "Because they are curious," Robby shrugged. "To them we must be like lab rats."

  "Oh, that's what they would like you to believe. But the truth is they want to take over the world. Total global domination. Then they can use us in whatever manner pleases them . . . "

  "Isn't that a little paranoid?" Robby interrupted. "I mean, surely a race that is so technologically advanced could just wipe us out any time they wanted to."

  "We're the government. We get paid to be paranoid. Who knows why they haven't made their move? Maybe the fact that we have interrupted their experiment means that we are a little smarter than they thought we were. Our plan is to breed this race of people to their top potential. By leaving them in normal American settings, we hope to avoid making them into the kind of unconscionable killing machines that the German subjects had become. They will grow up with allegiances to home, family and country. If there is an alien invasion, we will have an army of people ready to fight to defend our country."

  "If you treat them the way you have treated us, isn't there a very good chance that we may go over to the other side? After all, we are half alien, who's to say where our allegiances may lie?"

  "With the people and the families you know. That's just normal psychology."

  Robby nodded. That at least made sense. He'd certainly choose his family over a bunch of big-handed aliens.

  Spider and Mark came back then with more stuff than he thought they needed. They stacked most of it on Francis. They got in and Robby started the car. He looked over at Spider.

  "You're not going to believe what Francis just told me . . . "

  "Where the hell is he!" Rudy yelled. "I thought this guy was dependable."

  Helen looked at him. "Shush!"

  "Don't you shush me, girl! Where's your lover boy?"

  "Rudy . . . Robby's in the FBI. No one's supposed to know that he was here on an assignment . . . "

  "Oh, God, Helen! When are you ever going to learn? Some pretty boy comes in here with a line you could hang clothes on, and you're in love," Rudy said sympathetically.

  Helen started to get mad at him, but his conclusion was not entirely without justification. Helen did have a history of falling for the wrong kinds of guys. But this time Rudy was wrong.

  "Why would he leave the day before payday? He was after those SWTF creeps, and you know something went down over there last night," she whispered.

  Rudy laughed. "And you think that had something to do with lover boy? Come on, Helen . . . "

  "OK, OK. Let's just say you're right. But for my sake could you not mention that he's gone when we have customers?" Helen asked. "They might think I know something, and I could be in big trouble. You know how those guys are."

  Rudy nodded and sighed. "OK, Helen." He shook his head. "But you gott ah know that this guy fed you a load of crap."

  "I'll do the dishes till you get someone else, if you just please . . . "

  "I said I'd keep it on the QT, and I will. Rudy Hardly is nothing if not a man of his word."

  As the SWTF personnel started filing in, Helen noticed two things. First, many familiar lunchtime regulars were missing, and second, they weren't talking much. The slices of conversation she did catch sounded like they had just been through a war instead of a day's work.

  "We're picking up shit," one was whispering. "We lift up this huge piece of the ceiling, and under it there's like four guys—all dead."

  "Shush!" the guy he was talking to ordered.

  Helen put the menus and water in front of them and smiled. "Be back in a minute." She hurried away to wait on another customer.

  Everything she overheard was in the same vein. This one was dead, or that one was dead. This part of the building was totaled. Estimates on times and amounts of money it would take to repair the damage, etc., etc. But the most interesting piece of conversation had come from a couple of scientists sitting at one of the corner booths.

  "My point is," the one said to the other, "that the suits can only protect you from their psychic power. It can't protect you from things they can do with it. Like jerking guns out of your hand, starting the hallways on fire or caving the roof in."

  Either these guys had all seen the same sci-fi flick, or something really destructive had taken place at SWTF headquarters last night.

  Helen drove by the complex on her way home from work. A paving crew was working on the driveway, and another crew was installing new gates.

  When Robbie had said goodbye she'd hoped that he really was feeding her a line, and that he would be back later that night. But he hadn't come back, and he hadn't called, and he didn't come in for work. Now something had definitely happened at the SWTF complex.

  She wondered if Robby had been able to get his friend out. Wondered if he was still alive. For the thousandth time she wondered what the hell the SWTF really was.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  "Lo, this only have I found, That God has made man

  upright; but they have sought out many inventions."

  Ecclesiastes 7:29

  He knew they called him the oldest living Nazi war criminal. He didn't really care. It wasn't true, of course. He was a scientist, not a thug. He'd never gotten his hands dirty, not in Germany, and not here in the States. The government asked him to do a job; he did it and did it well. Hans Schultz couldn't help it if everyone else in this organization was an incompetent buffoon.

  He moved away from the window and sat down at his desk. They were right about one thing, though. He was old, very old. Shooting himself with alien DNA every few years had slowed down the aging process, but had by no means stopped it. While his mind was still sharp as ever, his body was slowly falling apart.

  He knew his remaining time on earth was short, and now at a time when he should have been able to sit back and enjoy the work of his hands, what happens? These idiots jeopardize the entire future of the project.

  Every time he turned around they were killing someone else to cover up their incompetence. And every time someone died, more questions got asked and more people got closer to finding out the truth. Therefore, more people had to be killed, causing more questions, getting an army of people ever closer . . .

  It was a vicious cycle. Once it got started, like a tidal wave there was no stopping it till it destroyed everything in its path. Damn it! They were so close! So close to having the perfect being. The people they made were smarter, faster, stronger, healthier, and the powers of their minds were unfathomable.

  But he hadn't bred them to fight an alien invasion. Nor had he bred them to be used in a war as common soldiers. Hans had a theory that mankind had started out smart and wound up stupid. He theorized that the Aryan world had started out as a hybrid, and had become stupider as it became more and more interbred with the ance
stors of the mud races.

  For this reason he had very carefully allowed only whites in his breeding program. When the computer found an alien hybrid that was of another ethnic origin, he had it destroyed usually before the "parents" could take it home.

  Hans had wondered why the aliens bothered to impregnate inferior people, and now he knew why. Apparently, when you crossed the superior intellect of an alien with the inferior intellect of a mud race, the hybrid could inherit all of its genes from the father, the superior genes of the father canceling out the genes of the inferior mother.