Complete Stories (62 page)

The Kid considered this. “Maybe not. But I know how to get past the gate. I’d like the chance to confront him about Becka. That shit was wrong. And while we’re at it, I’d dig another chance to hear that swimming-pool sound. I’ll bring a deck, man, and sample it. Yaaar. I’m glad you’re here to help me.”

“See, Zep,” gloated Delbert. He seemed to be hearing about every other word of what was said. “Let’s go to Gidget’s—he’s got my Woodie and everything. He’ll give me the big reward! That’s…that’s what the little shrimp things want. They’re telling me now, can’t you hear them? They’re telling me that Gidget wants to meet us. Especially you, Zep.”

This was definitely the worst Delbert had ever been. To some extent, Zep felt responsible—it was his surfboard, after all, that had put Delbert out of whack. ” “I’ll drive you guys up there,” said Zep slowly. “But you and me, Delbert, we get in, give Gidget the ball, ask for the reward, and get out . That’s it. In and out. And what the Kid does there is up to him.”

Delbert was pleased. He headed out the door toward the truck, hardly watching where he was going. The pitbull lunged, missed and fell over.

“Do you want to be in my new band?” Kid Beast asked Zep, upping the volume on his aquatic inferno for a last savoring second before switching off the power.

“I don’t play an instrument,” said Zep.

“Neither do I,” said the Kid. “That’s why I left the Aunties. They were starting sell out, getting into chords and shit.”

They drove through the narrow, winding hill streets of Surf City, past an endless repetition of miniature pastel-colored haciendas, each with a dwarf palm and a driftwood-and-bottleglass sculpture on the lawn. Zep didn’t trust Delbert to drive right now, and Del wasn’t interested in anything but the promises of his magic Sea Monkey sphere. Kid Beast sat between the two of them, giving occasional directions, though Zep already knew the way. Who didn’t?

While they were driving Zep kept thinking he saw pedestrians out of the corner of his eye. They’d pop out of nowhere and lurch towards the car. Zep would swerve, but then there’d be no one at all. It happened so often that he started to pick up on what seemed like a pattern. He only saw the ghost pedestrians at certain kinds of intersections, the ones were the streets were curved and one was running uphill. The weird walkers all looked like Kid Beast. Zep figured that Delbert’s ball was doing it to him, flashing little glimpses of his passenger onto his retina and then scrambling them with the crazy lines of the curbs. Thank God they were getting rid of the thing.

Soon the came to the pink stucco wall surrounding Gidget’s estate. Far ahead Zep could see the turreted roof of the mansion. The property wall held a wrought-iron gate decorated with dinosaurs. Long ago, when silicon was something that people were content to leave on beaches, the Gidget clan had made a tidy California fortune in oil. They weren’t the sort of people who forgot a thing like that. Zep had read somewhere that they’d even put Tyrannosaurus Rex on their family crest.

“Right,” said Kid Beast. “Honk four fast and three slow to make the gate open. Don’t worry, there’s only a few servants, and they stay in the house. We’ll see that prick Gidget himself, and, man, I’m going to let him have it.” Zep’s horn was broken, of course, so the three of them had to scream, “Honk-honk-honk-honk! Hooonk-hooonk-hooonk!” like rutting dinosaurs. A wild-eyed metal pterandon and a dainty diplodocus disengaged from a primordial French kiss, and the gate swung open with a wounded, rusty shriek.

Water sprinklers ran continuously all over the estate, and the grounds were lushly overgrown with exotic flowers and shrubs. It was more like a jungle than a formal garden—like something in one of those lost world movies. Kid Beast sat up, alertly shooting glances this way and that. “He’s got a whole maze of roadways here,” he said. They passed several side roads, and then the Kid pointed. “See the fork in the drive up there? The main entrance is around to the right. The pool and the garage are in back on the left. I’m thinking maybe it’s not so cool to confront Gidget. Turn left. We’ll throw the fucking bad-luck-ball in the pool, tape some sounds and split.”

Zep started to steer, but Delbert shouted, “No!” and wrenched the steering-wheel around to the right. Zep had a momentary feeling of being pulled in two and then, dammit, they were tooling up the drive towards the big house.

“Wrong way!” yelled Kid Beast, and pushed Delbert away from the steering-wheel. Zep hit the brakes and started to back up. He twisted around in his seat, staring out the pickup’s rear window. Just before he got back to the fork, a brilliantly polished ‘48 Country Squire Woodie came cruising out from the left fork that they’d missed. There were four people in the Woodie, one in back and three in front. At first all Zep saw was the beautiful blonde surfer chick sitting between the two guys in front. And then he noticed the faces of the others.

“Whoah,” he whispered. “That’s us.”

“There she is!” hollered Del. “My car, just like the shrimp things promised! Look, Zep, there’s beer in back and that glow on the dash is Jesus, and there’s three boards in back and everything. Don’t let them get away.”

But they did get away…they disappeared around a clump of bougainvillea, their happy voices fading like radio static into the hiss of the sprinklers, the
chunka-chunka-pfft
of lawn birds. Before Zep could decide what to do next, a plump man in shades and white suit came pooting down the drive in a golf cart. He was holding a machine-gun.

“That’s Logomarsino, Gidget’s bodyguard,” said Kid Beast, sinking down under the dash. “Don’t let him see me, man.”

“What are you worried about?” Zep asked sarcastically. “Guy’s only got an Uzi.”

Del leapt out of the car and waved his ball at the bodyguard. “Hey! How about my reward?”

The man in the golf cart, startled by what must have looked like a threatening gesture, squeezed off a burst. The bullets whizzed overhead, and the boys became studiously still. After the shots, the man stepped out of the cart and stared at them uncertainly. “You’re not real,” he croaked finally.

“Yes I am!” said Delbert indignantly. “You’re just trying to get out of giving me what I deserve.”

“I don’t think you’re real,” repeated the bodyguard. There was a noise in the distance: four short honks and three long ones. The bodyguard hopped back on his golf cart. “Now
that
sounds real!” he said, and sped off downhill.

“I want my reward,” said Del, plaintively. He started up the driveway to Gidget’s house. Zep took the precaution of turning his truck around, and then the and Kid Beast followed. On his way up the hill, Zep saw a couple more of the fast false images amidst Gidget’s jungle shrubbery—this time it was Del and the blonde girl. The images had a way of congealing out of flecks of color. There’d be like bright dots in the air, and then the dots would slide together in some filthy hyperdimensional way, forming a slightly grainy image of someone or something which would soon deconstruct itself into dots that drifted away like gnats.

“Hey Kid,” Zep finally thought to ask. “You see what I see?”

“Naw,” said Kid Beast. “I don’t see none of them freaky demonic manifestations, dude.” He lifted up the crucifix that hung from his neck and gave it a kiss.

Obviously Delbert was seeing the images, as he kept trying to talk to the ghosts, asking them when he’d get what he had coming. “Give it up, Delbert,” snapped Kid Beast, but now the mansion’s great madrone doors were swinging open to reveal a trim taut figure, all sheathed in shiny black. He held a glowing crystal in one hand, and there was a static of false images crowded around him like a ragged aura.

“Murderer!” screamed Kid Beast, flipping into a frenzy. “You killed that poor girl!”

“Hell, Beast, the dude’s wearing a wetsuit,” said Zep. “How bad can he be if he surfs?”

Seeing the weirdness and wealth, Zep was also flashing that no doubt Gidget had a monster stash somewhere. A pile of coke like in
Scarface
, right, a mound that you could just lower your snoggering face right down into. A fucking sandpile, man. Just thinking this, Zep could see the coke—or maybe it was acid-laced meth—sitting on a silver tray on a little three-legged table right at Gidget’s side. Zep gave Del a sharp jostle, grabbed the magic ball, and sprang first up the manse’s marble steps.

Delbert’s ball and Gidget’s ball picked up on each other. Little laser beams shot out of them, dancing off Zep and Gidget and the images around them. The billionaire frogman extended his one empty hand as a focus for the skittering beams, and within seconds all the little lines of light from Zep” ball had woven together into five brilliant strands, each one of them ending at one of Gidget’s fingertips.

Then Gidget closed his fist and the ball flew forward into his palm, carrying Zep with it. Now Zep was surrounded by the miasma of duplicate images which clung to Gidget like body odor; in fact, he was shaking the billionaire’s hand while a wiry tycoon arm slipped around his shoulder and gave him a friendly squeeze, leading him through the big doors and into the mansion.

“Get out of there, man!” he heard the Beast calling.

“Gimmie my ball, Zep, you weenie!”

But those were dim sounds, fading as he basked in the proximity of inconceivable wealth. Wealth, yes, it poured from the man. “Well, well,” Mr. Gidget was saying. “You’ve finally come to see me.” The madrone doors slammed shut, leaving Zep’s friends outside. He glanced around, looking around for that tremendous stash, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Gidget tossed the two balls from hand to hand like a juggler. “I’m quite pleased, yes. I sent my second sphere out on an errand this morning, and I’d wondered if it would really return. But I should have known better. These things pull the dimensions together so nicely, and all through the marvelous power of circumstance. There are no accidents, don’t you agree?”

“Definitely,” said Zep, feeling unaccountably mellow. The sounds of his friends pounding on the doors seemed very far away. “Deep down, everything always fits.”

“You sound sure of yourself,” said Gidget. “I like that in a young man. And such a strong-looking fellow. A surfer, am I right? I wonder, though. What use would a simple surf-bum have for an advanced piece of computer technology like a million-dollar Systems Complex CAM8 chip?”

“You—you—what are you talking about, man?”

“I believe you know what I mean. Someone bombed and robbed the Systems Complex warehouse…six months ago, hmmmm? Systems Complex is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gidgetdyne.”

A picture of Chaos Attractor danced out of the little ball and began zooming around Gidget’s head. A small figure stood on the board, a small lean image of Zep.

“Look,” said Zep, abandoning any hope of wall-papering his crime. “You want your CAM8 back? I’ve only been testing it out for you, Mr. Gidget. I’ve got it in my truck outside. In my surfboard.”

“Oh no, no, no. The CAM8 is obsolete now.
Six months ago
it was worth a million. But now—now all any of our customers would want is the new CAM10. They don’t know this yet, but they will soon. At present there’s only two CAM10s. The CAM8 simulated a space that was, oh, two-and-a-half dimensional. But the new CAM10 handles five dimensions, one of which is time. That’s why it was so easy for it to find you. Look.”

Gidget pried up the base of Del’s ball to reveal a glowing red jewel. He snapped the base shut again and the hidden hinges disappeared. “What makes the CAM10 chip particularly effective is that it drives a holographic laser display. When we’re through testing these two prototypes, we’ll go into full production.”

“How did it find me?” asked Zep. If they could just keep talking, maybe everything would be OK.

“An interesting question. Do you know about chaos theory? Of course you do. Why else would you have put the CAM8 chip in a surfboard?” Gidget was warming to his topic. “The CAM chips are so information-theoretically rich that they act as strange attractors in the fact-space of our reality.”

“I’m keyin’ you, dude,” said Zep. “Wave on this: I call my CAM8 surfboard Chaos Attractor!”

“You know, Zep,” beamed Gidget. “Maybe our research end could use a mind like yours. Frankly I’d been planning to let Cthulha’s daughter implant her neonate into the flesh of the CAM8 thief. But maybe—”

There was the sound of gunfire, of yelps, and of running feet. The front doors swung open to reveal the same Uzi-wielding bodyguard from before.

“Ah, Logomarsino,” said Gidget. “Have you taken care of our other intruders?”

“Hard to get a fix on them with all the ghost images,” said the bodyguard. “I just chased some of them away from your door.” He reached out and pinched Zep’s arm. “This is some live meat at last. The kid you were looking for, right? Let me tie him up and take him out to Cthulha’s daughter in the pool.

“Bag that action,” said Zep. “I’m R&D. I’m a computer scientist, dig? And what is this Cthulha’s daughter, anyway?”

“The spawn of a Great Old One,” said Gidget. “Neonate of an evil goddess-creature from another dimension. The CAM10 drew Cthulha here; she appeared in my swimming-pool the day I brought the chip home. It seems our supercomputational process has become so sensitive that different levels of reality are able to tune in upon it and to realize themselves. It’s a two-way street, it seems. Without Cthulha’s influence, I don’t think our hardware would function. But she’s a rather demanding guest. Although she only lives forty-nine days, on the last day of her life she produces a neonate that she needs to implant in human flesh. Today’s the day for Cthulha’s daughter to die—and to reproduce. Yes, today’s the day for the third in the line of the California Cthulha.”

“Cthulha’s granddaughter?” said Zep uncertainly.

“A male will do,” said Logomarsino. “And it’s not going to be me or Mr. Gidget.”

A faint sound came from the mansion’s real door. Delbert yelling and kicking at the back door. “GODDAMN YOU ALL, I WANT WHAT’S COMING TO ME!” Gidget and Logomarsino nodded and smiled at each other. Safe here in their intoxicating dimensional image zazz, Zep had to fight back the urge to grin along with them.