Hawaiian U.F.O. Aliens

by Mel Gilden

  Harry sat down behind his desk and grinned at me. It was the same grin he used in the picture. Old dependable.

  Bill and I were still standing. I pointed to one of the photos and said, 'All these kids wear the same style clothes.'

  The smile slipped a little, but he concentrated and jacked it up again. 'Little League. I'm an athletic supporter.' That made him laugh. It was either a real laugh or he'd been practicing it along with the smile. Bill laughed too and stopped before Harry did. When Harry noticed he was laughing alone, he looked at me earnestly and said, 'No Little League where you come from?' 'No leagues at all.' 'No baseball?' 'Oh, baseball. Sports. Sure. But no leagues. Not even tiny ones.'

  'I get it,' he said, and winked.

  Bill winked back by flashing the light in one eye.

  Harry got it. He was one up on me. I said, 'Why would Medium Rare want necklaces made from blowfish spines?'

  He knitted his fingers together on the desktop and said, 'Who's Medium Rare?'

  'If you don't know, why am I in here?'

  'Just being polite. I thought you were Medium Rare.' There was that smile again.

  Out front, a train went by slowly, breathing hard, as if each chuff would be its last. Everything in the room shook a little. Bill jiggled, but had no trouble keeping his balance. The heavy sound rolled into the distance, and I said, 'All right. What about this? Tell me about the necklaces.'

  'We have the licence in California.'

  'You need a licence to sell blowfish spine necklaces?'

  He got very serious and intense. 'In a manner of speaking, we do. We pay big bucks to use the Hands Tell A Story Tourist Bureau necklace design.'

  'Anybody in California using a different design?'

  'Not that I know of. Why would they?' He smiled.

  'For the money?' I said, guessing.

  'No reputable dealer would do business with them. It isn't worth the hassle from the Hands Tell A Story people. And before you ask, there are no disreputable dealers.'

  'So anybody who wants a blowfish spine necklace has to come to you. You ship them to Hawaii, and tourists bring them back.'

  'That seems to be the arrangement.' The arrangement pleased him. Smiling, he picked up a circle of purple plastic and flicked the edge with a thumbnail.

  'OK. So, it's a swell souvenir. Why would Medium Rare or anybody else want a lot of them?' An idea raised its hand. It had been there all the time, sitting in the corner of my brain not making a noise. I hadn't noticed it before, but I noticed it now. It excited me. It was brewski. It was pizza. It was chocolate-covered coffee beans. I said, 'Or maybe they just want one special one.'

  'There are no special ones,' Harry said. 'They're all the same. Made from the highest quality mould injected plastic.'

  So much for my exciting idea. I said, 'Not even real spines?'

  'You know what real spines cost?'

  'I know,' said Bill, brightly.

  'Keep it for later,' I said. 'So you sell necklaces made from fake blowfish spines. And they're all the same. What about the certificates of authenticity?'

  'Just enough to be dangerous, evidently. How authentic can the necklaces be if the spines are fake?'

  'They're not fake. Each is an authentic reproduction. It's like having a print of a piece of art.'

  'Sure it is. Just the same.'

  'Look,' he said. He got up, took a sheet from the top of a stack of papers, and handed it to me. Bill looked over my arm at it. The paper said: THIS IS A GENUINE SUE VENEER NOVELTY COMPANY BLOWFISH SPINE NECKLACE, AN INCREDIBLE SIMULATION OF THE KIND USED BY THE ANCIENT HAWAIIANS FOR MONEY AND GOOD LUCK.

  Below that was a signature. To one side was a small photograph of a pretty woman with high, round cheeks and a cloud of light, curly hair. It was a face that would smile easily, but it was not smiling now. At the moment it had the serious expression of somebody who could authenticate fake blowfish spine necklaces and make it stick. Her name was Busy Backson. I said, 'I'd like to visit Ms. Backson.' 'I don't give out that information.'

  'It's all right. I'm a private detective. I'm a professional.' 'I don't even know if you're human.' He smiled his smile. It was just a joke between us girls.

  'I'm human. I had a little problem with toxic waste and some nose drops.'

  Bill started to say something, but I was able to grab him around the throat before he could ruin everything.

  'Sorry,' Harry said. He stood up. He thought the interview was over, but the fun was just beginning. People began shouting outside, and we looked through the glass wall. A man and a woman were out there. The man wore white pants and shoes, and the most riotous flowered shirt I had ever seen—louder than the design on a twelve-year-old's skateboard. The woman wore a slightly more sedate print dress and red pumps. A human male would have enjoyed the legs rising out of them.

  The man and the woman each wore a pile of flowered necklaces that rose, one atop the other, right up to their eyes. You couldn't see what they looked like, but their eyes could have been Polynesian, and the woman's hair was a blonde cascade that puddled around her shoulders.

  At the moment, each of them was flinging magic.

  Chapter 12

  It's Magic

  OR maybe it wasn't magic. The science of any sufficiently advanced race, you know. Whatever it was, it did the job.

  Wherever the man pointed, a green worm burst out of the ground, quickly became a green arm exploding with thorns. The arm became a trunk, and the trunk spread to become a wall. In seconds, a thicket of thorns taller than the building surrounded the truck and the two Polynesians.

  Wherever the woman pointed, a spout of flame lifted a box out of the warehouse and loaded it into the truck as if the box were a spaceship in one of those cheap fifty's sci-fi movies. She was a perfect shot. Never missed.

  Bill was fascinated, of course. Harry seemed astonished at first, but then his face hunkered down into a mask of self-righteous anger.

  The labourers were shouting in a foreign language that may have been Spanish. They prudently backed off, but once they saw they were safe they called encouragement and blew noisy kisses. The two Polynesians took no notice.

  Harry cried, 'Those people are stealing from me,' and slid the glass door open so hard it bounced against the end of its track. I couldn't tell whether Harry was upset because the two were stealing, or because they were stealing from him. He ran outside but was stopped pretty quick by sword-length thorns and vines that appeared to be tougher than telephone cord. I could see only his back, but his body language was pretty clear, even to me, a guy with a different type of body altogether. As he watched, he became as despondent as a melting snowman, except his hands which were balled into fists; his fingers might as well have been bananas.

  He ran back to the open door, called, 'Hilda, get my rifle,' and looked again through the roughage at the two loading the truck. Either they hadn't heard, or gunshots did not concern them.

  'What?' Hilda cried. Bill and I looked in her direction.

  'My rifle, Hilda. My rifle,' Harry cried. Bill and I looked in his direction. We weren't learning anything, but the level of entertainment was rising.

  'What?' Hilda cried. She strutted into the office and at first was surprised to see me there alone. Then she saw what was going on outside. Her mouth opened wide, and she covered it with one hand.

  Harry ran into the room, and quickly, as if ordering a stubborn child to bed, said, 'Hilda, get my rifle right now.' Hilda ran off, clattering a sloppy cadence with her high heels.

  It wasn't long before the blonde Polynesian woman was done loading the truck. The man swung up under the steering wheel, and she swung up beside him. The thorn bush wilted where the truck went through. The truck turned left at the alley, and a moment later was gone.

  Hilda ran into the office gripping the rifle. 'Excuse me,' she said as she ran past me and Bill and out the door.

  Harry turned around and looked calmly at Hilda and the rifle she carried. As if reasoning with
that same naughty child who still would not go to bed, he started in on her. He flattened her with the steam roller of his words, then backed up and did it again. According to him, it was all her fault that the hijackers had gotten away with a truck full of his merchandise. Everything was her fault. If it wasn't for her, the entire world would be free of war, starvation and sickness.

  Then she gave it back to him, whining that it wasn't her fault, that she'd had trouble hearing him, then trouble finding the rifle, then trouble finding the ammunition. She never suggested that he hadn't done anything either, that he might have gotten the rifle and the ammunition himself.

  They were a fine pair, and just watching them work each other over made me want to go back to T'toom. I walked out to join them.

  I said, 'Are you two dandelions about done?'

  'Excuse me?' Hilda said. She wasn't angry, just confused.

  'Because if you are, it's not too late to call the police.' Harry's eyes narrowed. He looked tough with that rifle in his hand. Oh, yes. Tough as one of his Little Leaguers holding a baseball bat. He said, 'Have you called the police, Hilda?'

  'Why, no. I didn't think—'

  'Well, don't just stand there, Hilda. Go do it.' She walked back into the office, mumbling in a shrill voice how she was going as fast as she could and that she hoped the 911 number worked.

  I strode to the nearest thorn and Harry called after me, 'Where are you going? This is private property.'

  'Just taking a look,' I said pleasantly. 'Aren't you curious?'

  A moment later, he was beside me, watching me touch the thorns and the vines. I bent a thorn and it sprang back like a spring, even making the kind of comic spring sound you'd hear in a cartoon.

  The whole thicket seemed to be made of some kind of rubber, and it was already sagging and evaporating into the air.

  'I'll be doggoned,' Harry said.

  'Sure. And while you're doing that, Bill and I'll have a look in your warehouse.'

  I could hear him behind me, but didn't turn around. When I got into the warehouse I found the labourers yammering around a hole just wide enough for one of them to jump into without touching the sides. Maybe it wasn't a hole. But it was round and seemed to have no colour at all, not even black. You couldn't look right at it without going a little crazy. Rising from the hole were heat and a noxious vapour that drilled up into back tunnels of my sinus cavities that were previously unknown, even to me. Neither the look nor the smell seemed to bother Bill, who walked right up to the edge of the hole and looked down.

  'Fire?' I said and made a motion like a crate sailing through the air.

  The labourers didn't say anything I understood, but they nodded.

  Harry said, 'This where the explosions came from, Haysoos?'

  The labourer named Haysoos said, 'Si, Harry.'

  Evidently the holes were handy little do-it-yourself volcanoes that the woman had flung under crates in Harry's warehouse by science or magic—take your pick. It was a nice effect either way. Controlled eruptions had blasted the crates into the truck. I hoped the holes wouldn't start to erupt again.

  Bill leaned over a little too far. He squawked, flapped his wings, and was gone before anybody could catch him. I looked into the hole, blinking against the bad breath rising from it. Bill tumbled as he fell, getting smaller and smaller.

  'Bill,' I cried, feeling a sickness that had nothing to do with my knock on the head or noxious vapours.

  Bill was now no more than a point of glimmering light. 'Get a rope, Haysoos!'

  'I don't think we have one long enough.'

  'Get a rope!'

  Haysoos went away, as much to get away from me as anything else, I suspect. I kicked at the hole, expecting this to be a useless, emotional act. I kicked at the hole, and one side of it curled back like a circle of rubber and laid back flat on the ground with a slap. I looked closely. The hole was still just a hole.

  'What is it?' Harry said.

  Saying nothing, I reached for the edge of the hole as if it were a snake. Gently I took it in two fingers and lifted a little. It was easy. I lifted some more, and saw that the dirty cement under the hole looked and felt just like the dirty cement anywhere else in the garage.

  'I'll be doggoned,' Harry said. The labourers grumbled among themselves and more than one of them made a cross on their chests.

  I pulled the hole up more and found Bill. He was just standing there blinking and wobbling a little. In my hand I held a thin black sheet. I reached into one side, and my hand disappeared into something hot. I touched the other side, and felt something cool, but smooth and real.

  'Where were you, Bill?'

  'I don't know, Boss. I was falling, and then I wasn't.'

  'I'll be doggoned,' Harry said.

  I rolled up the hole, smooth side out, and handed it to Harry. At first he didn't want to take it, but then his tongue watered his lips and he took it eagerly, hungrily. 'This would make a great little item,' he said.

  I grabbed Bill around the neck and held him just tightly enough so he couldn't run away.

  I took a deep breath and said, 'OK. What was taken?'

  'Haysoos?' Harry said.

  Haysoos gave orders to his crew and they climbed over the boxes remaining in the warehouse, noting what was missing. One of them called to Haysoos. Haysoos said, 'Only blowfish spine necklaces, Harry.'

  'Isn't that what you were asking about?' Harry said suspiciously. He almost pointed the rifle at me, but it only wobbled.

  'I was expecting something like this to happen. That's why I'm here.'

  Bill squeaked out, 'Gee,' as if he were impressed.

  'I have a different idea about it,' Harry said. 'I think you should wait till the police come.' This time he raised the rifle. He was close enough not to miss me or the crates behind me.

  'It's more important that I see Busy Backson.'

  'I told you about that.'

  'Don't you want your stuff back?'

  'The police will get my stuff back.'

  'They will if they believe your story about giant thickets and convenient explosions.'

  'I'll show 'em the holes.'

  'Look at the one in your hand.' It looked like a melted candy bar. Harry tried to unroll it, and it dripped to shreds. In a second it was no more than something to wash off your hands.

  Harry frowned, and pulled at his lower lip. 'You're a witness,' he said.

  'You saw the same thing I did.'

  'What does Busy have to do with this?'

  'It's a long story. Every moment we wait, that truck gets farther away.'

  'Can I trust you?' he said, and gave me the old dependable smile.

  'Look,' I said. 'I don't know why you think I had anything to do with the heist. It's no secret that you have blowfish spine necklaces here. Everything would have gone pretty much the same if I hadn't been here. I'm already on this case, while the police would be just starting. What are you losing by trusting me?'

  'What about your fee?'

  'Don't worry about that. I'm being well paid by my other client.' Sure, Whipper Will would call me an aggro dude and let me stay in his house some more.

  Harry nodded, and I followed him back to the office. The thorns were just about gone, leaving not so much as a green puddle. He ducked into a tiny bathroom off his office and wiped his hand. The sludge had evaporated, just like the thorns.

  Harry looked up a phone number in a card file. A moment later he was talking into the phone, laughing, having a wonderful time. He was so slick I'm surprised the receiver stayed in his hand. When he hung up, he said, 'She'll see you as a personal favour to me.' He gave me her address and began to tell me how to get there.

  'I'll find it,' I said. 'Oh, yeah. When you tell the police your story, would you kind of leave me out of it.'

  'Why?'

  'Don't you think my presence might confuse things?'

  He thought about that for a moment and nodded.

  When Bill and I went through the front offi
ce, Hilda was making check marks again, and the harried kid was typing. Business goes on. With a guy like Harry it would always go on. I wished the police luck. That, and a strong stomach.

  Chapter 13

  Harry Sent Me

  BUSY Backson lived in Hermosa Beach, a pastel place that existed only to charge people for parking when they went to the beach. If it was like other water front communities, there would be no parking space without its parking meter.

  Traffic was heavier, and the sun had disappeared in the bank of unwashed cotton wool that covered the western sky. It showed through the clouds like a dime. The side of my head throbbed and moving suddenly still made me dizzy. Feeling better should not feel this bad.

  Bill was still dazed from his experience with the black hole, but I kept reminding him of Busy Backson's address in Hermosa Beach, and his bubble memory came around at last.

  We had plenty of time, manoeuvring along narrow streets between new apartment buildings that grudgingly allowed me a free glimpse of the Pacific between them. I asked Bill to explain again what being in the black hole was like, but he never said anything more descriptive than what he'd said at first. 'First I was falling, and then I wasn't.'

  Neighbourhoods that could have been anywhere slid by. I let them. I had other things on my mind, like the growing popularity of blowfish spine necklaces.

  The first group to be interested in the spines contained two Polynesians who might have been the crew of the top hat, and therefore, were responsible for Captain Hook's sudden preoccupation with proving the hand is quicker than the eye, and therefore, the sooner I found them, the better. It was a mystery why they wanted souvenir necklaces that were all the same. Maybe they were going to start a business back home. That was my bump on the head talking. I rubbed my nose with a free hand and kept thinking. Then there was Avoirdupois. As far as I could tell, his interest was purely journalistic. The rumours, wishful thinking, and outright but colourful lies his paper called news connected the spines to space travellers, and he thought they might lead him to the Polynesians who he also thought were connected with the top hat. He wanted to get the story. That was all. That was all he would admit, anyway.