Hawaiian U.F.O. Aliens Read online

  Hawaiian U.F.O.

  Aliens

  Zoot Marlow

  Book II

  Mel Gilden

  A Byron Preiss Book

  First Published, 1989

  First Published Penguin Books, 1990

  Copyright © 1989

  Zoot designed by David Dorman

  Cover Illustration; James Manh

  CONTENT

  Excerpt

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Quotes

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Double-O Zoot—Licence Granted

  Chapter 2 Beads And Trinkets

  Chapter 3 The Magic Top Hat

  Chapter 4 A Fist Full Of Rabbit

  Chapter 5 Phantom Phone Calls At The Malibu Bar And No-Grill

  Chapter 6 Progress Happens

  Chapter 7 Bay City Manners

  Chapter 8 Con Carney's Lucky Day

  Chapter 9 Blowfish Spines Of The Gods?!

  Chapter 10 Here Today—Gone To Maui

  Chapter 11 A Certificate Of Authenticity

  Chapter 12 It's Magic

  Chapter 13 Harry Sent Me

  Chapter 14 As Plain As The Nose On My Face

  Chapter 15 A Sentimental Geek Thinking Wishfully

  Chapter 16 A Brisk Business In Hoo-Doo

  Chapter 17 Like Circles That Cross In The Night

  Chapter 18 I Paint What I See

  Chapter 19 Cruise Patrol

  Chapter 20 Like Something Out Of Poe

  Chapter 21 I Ain't Got No Body

  Chapter 22 Not A Bad Way To Spend Eternity

  Chapter 23 The Big Broadcast

  Chapter 24 A Pineapple With My Name On It

  Chapter 25 The Show In The Oahu Room

  Chapter 26 A Night Too Full Of Policemen

  Chapter 27 Magic Words

  Chapter 28 The Troubles Of A Sufficiently Advanced Race

  Chapter 29 Fair Game For The Wind

  Chapter 30 Cockeyed Opportunists

  Chapter 31 The Other Painting

  Excerpt

  THUMPER pounded the flat of his hand against the floor and shouted 'Ahh-roooh! Zoot is back!' The rest of them took up the cry.

  At my feet was a puddle of salt water big enough to do laps in. I waved at the crowd, told them that I had to change, and walked along the dark hall to Whipper Will's room. As far as I could tell, nothing had been touched. Nobody had washed the laundry, that was for sure.

  Feeling more like myself all the time, I went back into the bedroom and put on my Earth clothes. The brown suit felt natural. The trenchcoat and the fedora could wait. I was ready for anything now, so I went back into the bedroom and hefted Bill out of the closet.

  Even in the dim light. Bill's silver body shone. I could barely hear a song about surfing and young love that was playing on the TV in the other room. Rain blew against the side of the house, went away, came back even harder. I reached down and pulled the flypaper off Bill's head. He blinked and said, 'Bay City! Ya! Have a nice trip, Boss.'

  'I had a nice trip, thanks. Now I'm back.'

  Dedication

  FOR SIDNEY IWANTER:

  Friend in Need, Patron of the Arts. And A Guy Who Knows A Good Idea When He Sees One

  Acknowledgements

  THANKS to Doctors Jon Davidson and An Yin of the U.C.L.A. Earth and Space Sciences Department for the geological information I put into the mouth of the man from Pasadena Tech in Chapter Twenty-Four. Any inaccuracies are my fault. I took lightning notes over the phone and may not have gotten all the facts down correctly. (The rest of the book, however, is definitely true. Really. Trust me.)

  Also, thanks to Ms. Sandra Borders, librarian first class, who gave me a lot of information. I didn't use much of it, but that's not her fault.

  Quotes

  'The science of any sufficiently advanced race is indistinguishable from magic.'

  Arthur C. Clarke

  'Every intelligent race in the universe has a semantic equivalent for the request, "Pick a card, any card."'

  Michael Kurland

  Introduction

  WHIPPER Will and I both decided we needed vacations. Detective work is not as easy as it looks, not even if you ignore the guns, the long hours, and the abuse: not even if you squint. So I figured I deserved some time off.

  But all Will and his surfing gang did all day was hang around his beach house, get high on yoyogurt, and surf by proxy with their big, gnarly, party-size robots.

  Don't get me wrong. I like Will. He's a smart, smooth guy who's learned how to keep other people's secrets by practising with his own. He saved my life a couple of times, both metaphorically and literally. I just don't understand what a guy who seemingly makes his living goofing off does on his vacation.

  But his friends and I gathered in front of his house to say goodbye, just as if he were an accountant or something.

  Days before, I asked him about his vacation plans and he told me, 'We're going to Hawaii for the waves, for the pure, unadulterated, unsweetened, island juice.'

  Now, we looked at the pod mall across Pacific Coast Highway

  while we made small talk to fill in the time before the shuttle came. Small talk made a nice change from saying goodbye again.

  The shuttle came at last, and Will left for the airport with his girlfriend, Bingo. We waved at Will and Bingo until waving seemed pointless, and straggled back into the house.

  I was now alone with the other people who lived there. Which meant that I was pretty much alone. Unlike Whipper Will, none of them seemed to have thoughts in particular. But they were all bitchen bros permanently stoked on each other, brewski, and ripping surf.

  Flopsie (or was it Mopsie?), one of the red-headed twins, sat down in one of the permanent depressions on the lump of couch in the big living room. Mustard took up a position on the floor between her bare legs and lifted to his lips a small furled umbrella full of a substance that hodads and full hanks were not meant to know. He and Flopsie passed it up and back, each taking a turn suckling hard on one end of the umbrella and holding their breaths.

  The thick curtains were closed, and the only illumination in the room came from the TV set. On it, healthy boys and girls were slamma-jamming in top-to-bottom tubes that were too fresh to be true. They were surfing. It was good surf, but that's all they were doing. I guess the novelty was that the surfers were real people, not robots. You didn't see much of that these days.

  These days, a surfer's idea of a personal mano-a-mano type confrontation with the waves was to send out a big, waterproof robot that he could control from a remote box while standing on the beach. Most surfers never even got wet. It was as dangerous as checkers and took all the skill of a reasonably good taxicab driver.

  Flopsie and Mustard watched the movie with the intense concentration of brain surgeons who were twiddling a ganglia with a knife.

  Nobody else was in there, just a lot of pillows with grey spots where many heads had rested, surfing posters on the walls among seashells, blowfish and fishnets, newspapers from the last three weeks, plates encrusted with food so old and dry it didn't even smell any more, not even if you were sniffing with my relatively large, Toomler-size schnoz.

  I was leaving pretty soon, too, but there were a few things I had to do before I took off. I went into the bedroom Whipper Will shared with Bingo, and found Bill standing in the back corner in front of Will's Rotwang 5000 personal computer. I was familiar enough with the house that I barely noticed the heavy smell of linen that had been too long without benefit of soap and water.

  'Bill?' I said.

  He didn't answer. Which was strange because he was a robot and programmed to pay attention. I tried again, with the same result. Small bits flashed an
d passed on the computer screen, like tiny green fish.

  I crossed the room, avoiding the piles of clothing, camping equipment and junk that I still couldn't identify, even after months on Earth, and stood at Bill's left shoulder. A cable snaked from Bill's shiny, duck-shaped body and plugged into the back of the terminal. That's why he was even more engrossed than the two in the living room.

  A game was in progress on the screen, but the playing pieces moved too fast for me to follow. The game was over in less than a minute, and without pause another began. I pushed the ESCAPE key and waited. The screen went blank and Bill looked up at me as if he'd been asleep. I am not a big guy compared to an Earthperson, and Bill would barely come up to my belly button, if I had one.

  'Hey, boss,' Bill said.

  'I'm leaving.'

  'Back to Bay City,' Bill laughed. He had absorbed my sense of humour, which is the kind of thing that happens to personal bots.

  'Far from Surfing Samurai Robots and hostile natives,' I said quickly, and before either of us could think about it, I slapped a sheet of flypaper on top of his head, stick-um side down. He stopped in mid-chuckle and his eyes went dark.

  I had done the kindest thing possible. I couldn't take Bill to, er, Bay City. Who knew what outrageous, perhaps even true, thing he would say to people? And I couldn't leave him to the warped mercies of Whipper Will's housemates. Instead, I had turned him off. I stood him in the wardrobe behind a curtain of Hawaiian shirts that were so loud you could hear them from the next room even with the wardrobe door closed.

  I took off my shoes, put away my brown suit, the trench-coat and the fedora. I put on my short Johns, told Bill to stay out of trouble, and left the room.

  In the kitchen, Thumper, the tallest of the bunch, was absent-mindedly using a spatula to tap a toasted cheese sandwich in a frying pan while he watched Captain Hook out the window. Captain Hook was standing defiantly at the edge of the water, controlling his surf-bot with a remote control box. The day was cold, and except for Captain Hook and a few diehard joggers, the golden sands of Malibu were deserted.

  Mopsie (or was it Flopsie?) was sitting at the Formica-topped dining table at one end of the room, listening to Thumper discuss the quality of Captain Hook's hotdogging.

  To me she said, 'Going?' The fact that I was wearing a wet suit and not carrying any luggage did not seem to bother her.

  'Yeah. Be cool, you hear?'

  Thumper nodded at my sage advice, then happened to glance out the window. He jubilantly cried. 'Wipeout!'

  Mopsie shook her head and said, 'Captain Hook'll be raw all day.'

  'Yeah, well, hang loose, dude,' Thumper said, and clasped my hand in a complicated grip that the surfers had taken one hilarious evening to teach me. Mopsie bent low to hug me. Her tits were in my face. For that moment, I wished I'd been human so I could appreciate them.

  I walked outside, through the small brick backyard, across the public blacktop walkway and across the sand. The sand crunched pleasantly beneath my feet as the cold wind whipped around my bare legs and arms. I could smell hamburger grease from miles away, maybe as far as Santa Monica. A guy had to be desperate to open his stand on a day like this. I didn't look forward to the cold swim, but there was no other way to get to my sneeve.

  'Hang loose,' I hollered above the wind at Captain Hook.

  He waved in my direction, but he was too busy with his surf-bot to say anything.

  Even wearing the short Johns, I got a chilling shock when I stepped into the water, and for a moment I couldn't breathe. I swam for a good long time, until I came even with a point I knew, and dived. Seconds later I was cycling the screw on my sneeve, the Philip Marlowe, and stripping off the abbreviated rubber suit. I wiped myself down with a handful of treated tree sap that was not very much like a warm dry towel.

  So, I went back to T'toom.

  No playing of recordings of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe on this return voyage. I had the complete books of Raymond Chandler and a few other mystery novels that had been recommended to me. Trouble was my business, oh yes, I'd proved that on Earth. But now I had real trouble. I had to go home and face my relatives.

  The ride was not long, but it was longer than the average Gino and Darlene movie, and my attention span felt the strain. I had time to check my cargo again. There was nothing new since I'd loaded it and checked it the week before. I sat down to read The Maltese Falcon and eat my own recycled wastes.

  Sam Spade was an aggro dude, just like Marlowe, but without quite such an emphasis on the smart mouth. Spade was good, but the smart mouth appealed to me, too. I thought I'd stick with Philip Marlowe for a while yet.

  After a week of thinking like that, Spade and Marlowe were having conversations right there aboard the sneeve. They both looked like Humphrey Bogart, and I had trouble telling them apart. Evidently, so did they. In my dreams, they traded quips with each other. I couldn't think of a thing to say, and I woke up sweating.

  My family never expected to see me again, and my arrival on T'toom caused quite a stir. Grampa Zamp rubbed my nose raw with congratulations, and I would have avoided him if I'd liked him less.

  I hadn't realized how settled I'd gotten on Earth until I saw the slick, wet-looking buildings oozing out of the soil of T'toom and thought how much they looked like fruit-flavoured slugs. Another thing I was not used to was being the same size as everybody else. There was not a pug nose on the planet, I didn't know whether to be relieved or threatened.

  Way back when, Dad had been against my going to Earth, but now he threw me a big Welcome Home party. I hoped T'toom Gravitational Products was doing OK, because just re-oozing the house for the event must have set him back plenty.

  The day after, I knew the party was really over when I walked into the dining room and saw the family assembled. Dad was at one end of the table, and Mum at the other. Grampa Zamp sat between them, filled with so much curiosity I could almost see it frothing out of him. Their noses were quivering, meaning my family was ready for anything.

  'We're not at a party now,' Dad said. 'Tell us what Earth is really like.'

  Terrific. I like Earth, despite its obvious defects. Maybe I liked it because of its defects. But generally it was a pretty nice place. Kate Smith used to sing that it had purple mountains' majesty, fruited planes, that sort of thing. If I told anybody on T'toom the truth, entire families would be sneeving over there on vacation. Even if they didn't land. UFO sightings would be a nightly event.

  So I made up such a story, my face is still red, or would be if I knew how to blush. According to me, Earth was a snake pit, a dark, dismal place full of cold rocks and hot-blooded creatures that would gobble you down in unexpected, unpleasant ways.

  'You were there for a long time,' Dad said.

  'I wanted to make sure,' I said.

  Mum and Dad nodded, but Grampa Zamp looked as surprised and unhappy as if I'd dumped slaberingeo spine fixer over him.

  'Besides,' I said, 'I wanted to stay long enough to bring back my cargo.' I pulled a plastic leather-look bag from a pocket and poured a pile of small brown pellets on the table. Nobody moved. Grampa Zamp had the wit to ask me what they were.

  'Chocolate-covered coffee beans.'

  'What does that mean?' Dad said.

  'Try one.'

  The only one who moved was Grampa Zamp. As he picked one up, I said, 'Suck on it. The outside is soft and will melt. The inside is hard and brittle and will take some chewing.'

  Grampa Zamp put the bean into his mouth, and his face lit up like Dodger Stadium at night. After that, the beans went pretty fast.

  'You got these on Earth?' Dad said.

  I nodded. 'The storeroom on my sneeve is full of them. I figured you could sell them by the pound and make back the money I owe you.' Dad got a faraway look on his face as he began to think about the possibilities.

  'Earth?' said Mum. 'Terrible old Earth?'

  I put my hand on Mum's and said, 'Once you've tasted chocolate-covered coffee beans, you've
experienced the best Earth has to offer. Trust me.'

  I had been told that in Hollywood. "Trust me," means "Knickers to you." But nobody on T'toom except me had ever visited Hollywood, so when I said, 'Trust me,' that's what they did.

  A day or two later, the media discovered me, and I became a celebrity. I was on shows explaining Earth's radio programmes. I told the same lie about Terrible Old Earth, or variations on it, till I had it down pretty good. The photographs I had taken of Whipper Will and the other surfers caused quite a sensation, and a lot of biologists went back to their drawing boards shaking their heads. Dad's chocolate-covered coffee beans disappeared almost overnight. The loan was paid off, and Dad gave me the money that was left over.

  After that, things got quiet. I'd had my fifteen minutes of fame on T'toom. I read my books and hung with my family, but very soon, I was bored. I didn't know if I had changed or life on T'toom was more placid than it had been, but I was bored. Then I realized that I wasn't just bored, I was hungry for Earth. Trouble is my business, after all, and there isn't much of it on T'toom.

  I began to collect stuff to take to Earth with me: personal papers; pictures of the family; a little of the household ooze, just for old times' sake; boxes of Toomler stories; and a couple of extra slaberingeo spines, you never know when your sneeve might need a replacement.

  I was listening to a Beethoven symphony on a recording of Voice of Firestone when Grampa Zamp caught me with all this stuff laid out on my bed. While he watched, I kind of moved it around, hoping the collection looked natural, like something anybody might have on their bed.

  Grampa Zamp said, 'Going somewhere?'

  I looked at Grampa Zamp. My nose must have been twitching a mile a minute, but he was very relaxed. I took a chance and said, 'Yeah. I'm going back to Earth.'

  His nose went up, then down, 'I thought Earth was some kind of interstellar death trap.'

  'Depends on who you ask,' I said. After that, I told Grampa Zamp the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I told him about Sylvia Woods and Surfing Samurai Robots and Whipper Will and the gang. He asked a lot of questions. I guess he found the story pretty entertaining because when I got down he asked me, 'Why did you lie?'