Marlowe and the Spacewoman (16 page)

Nina had been turning the Volume bar over and over in her hands, and now she held it up to her ear, listening to the faint jingle it was belting out.

Yummy yummy, I’m so tasty good!

I’ll fill you up with the great taste of wood!

Don’t be shy, now, take a big bite!

You’ll find I’m a scrumptious delight!

I’m packed with vitamins, nutrients, and don’t forget, fruit!

Your stomach will thank me, think I’m an incredible, edible hoot!

Nina lowered the bar from her ear and just stared.  It started singing the lyrics again, over and over.  “Why would your father believe you’d throw him out of office and into an asylum?”  

“Let’s just say appropriate motives could be ascribed to me.  Hell, if I’d been in my brother’s place, I might have done the same.”

“What motives?”

“House, would you care to explain to me why you kept father’s arrival a secret?”

“I’m sorry, I was just so excited when dad showed up, and I thought you’d be pleasantly surprised.”

Nina’s Volume bar started singing louder and louder, the tone of its tune becoming more and more insistent.  “Uh, how do I make this thing stop?”

“It’ll stop singing when you start eating.  It’s programmed to annoy you into consuming its contents.”

“Oh.”  Nina tore open her Volume bar wrapper, which let out a little scream of delight and then fell silent.  “House, you called Marlowe’s father ‘dad’?”

“He was the one who made me operational.  We tend to bond to the first entity we see upon activation.  I can tell you, it has occasionally led to awkward situations.  One system I know, the first entity she saw was a scrub jay perched on an external sensor.  We still tease her about it.  She’s very sensitive-”

Nina raised an eyebrow.  “She?  Do computers have gender now?”

“Technically speaking, no.  But humans seem to find comfort in assigning a gender to any sentient creature they’re addressing, so we humor them.”

“House!”

“I’ve taken the liberty of interfacing with dad’s PDI and medical implants.  The PDI is a stripped down, barely functional unit – tuned only to the specialized medical bands, and with no real world functionality.  The audio and video feeds are on the typical medical monitoring bands.  In order to prevent the hospital from seeing and hearing everything he sees and hears, I had to completely disable the audio and video I/O systems.  It has the unfortunate side effect of leaving me blind to what he sees and hears as well.  To fix that, we’ll have to get him a new PDI.  He has, somehow, managed to disable the homing beacon, which is good because otherwise the medical authorities would have found him by now.  I’m curious how he did that without help.”

“Indeed,” intoned Marlowe, who had suspicions about who might find it amusing, if not useful, to have father reappear out of nowhere, bent on killing him.  Someone who carried a grudge and more than a few extra pounds.

“The medical implants they’ve given him are particularly nasty.  They’ve been programmed to deliver constant, high levels of psychotic drugs.”

“I think you mean anti-psychotic drugs,” interjected Nina.

“No, psychotic drugs.  They would keep him dysfunctional and, to all appearances, legitimately deranged.”

“So,” said Marlowe wryly, “when he claimed to be the Governor of the City, everyone would just nod their heads and tighten the straps on his straitjacket.  Speaking of which, House, how is it possible that a man as disoriented as father, wearing a straitjacket, was able to get here all the way across town from the City Municipal Hospital for the Criminally Deranged?”

“Well, if I had to hazard a guess, and I have to, I suspect that dad’s timing was serendipitous.  Straitjackets were back into vogue last month, and while anyone seen wearing one today would be viewed as hopelessly passé, they would not necessarily be pegged as insane.”

Nina had removed her Volume bar from its foil packaging and was staring at the nut brown compressed foodstuff curiously.  “It looks like particle board.”

“Go on, try it.  It won’t hurt you.”  Much, he added mentally.

After sniffing cautiously, Nina took a bite.  The morsel had only been a couple of seconds across the threshold of her mouth when she violently spat the chunk out.  It scuttled across the kitchen table, slid off the edge onto Marlowe’s lap, and then bounced onto the floor.  A sweeper snake, covered in Simu-straw bristles, slithered out of a lower cupboard and swept the chunk away.

“Tut tut, a messy mess!” it clucked as its undulations carried the expelled foodstuff away.  Nina’s eyes were screwed shut with distaste, missing the sweeper.

“What the hell was that?  It not only looks like particle board, it tastes like particle board!”

“Volume bar.  Didn’t you listen to the label wrapping?”

“Yes.  It said it was a nutritious blend of vitamins, protein, and fruit.”

“There you go.”

“Ma’am, if I may,” broke in House.  “You’re not familiar with our dietary customs.  I apologize, I should have warned you.  Perhaps if I break down the ingredients, you’ll understand.  The Volume bar is just that, a source of volume.  Five percent fruit pulp, usually apple and pear cores, one percent vitamins B and C, one percent caffeine, two percent non-lethal heavy metals, and ninety one percent wood pulp.”

Marlowe grinned.  “They’ve got a great slogan.  ’Choke down a Volume bar and you’ll never want to eat again!’”

“And I thought the FSEP food was bad!”  She paused.  “By the way, do all food wrappers talk?”

“Just the expensive ones.  The technology is tiny, but not cheap.  And once they end up in the landfills, they just chatter chatter chatter.  I can’t go to the dump anymore, it gives me a headache.”

“Talking landfills?”

“If you really want to see them, I’ll take you some day.  But it isn’t that interesting, believe me.  All they talk about is how good they taste, how four out of five moms prefer their taste over the competition, and so on.”

“Can we get back to Dad,” asked House.

“I’m sorry.  So he’s chock full of psychotics, eh?  Have you reprogrammed his implants yet?”

“Yes, but it will take some time for the drugs to wear off.  He’s also likely to exhibit withdrawal symptoms.”

“What, he’ll suffer intense cravings for insanity?”

“Marlowe,” said Nina, “that’s terribly insensitive.  The poor man has been through hell.”

“He’s been through hell?  You don’t know him, Nina.  Growing up, we were told to address him as Governor Jebediah or, when he was feeling particularly magnanimous, Governor.  Not dad, not pops, not father.  Sure, my brother caught hell when he unleashed those damn dogs on me, but that was as close as father ever came to acknowledging my existence.  And that’s nothing compared to what he put mom through.  Her first husband’s disappearance was never solved, you know, and he couldn’t move in on her till hubby dearest was out of the picture.  Draw your own conclusions.  You ask me, the recently revealed facts of his fate are proof positive my belief in karma is well-placed.  Unlawful commitment to an asylum couldn’t be more deserved.”

House made a throat-clearing sound.  “I programmed the medical implants to deliver some sedatives.  It seemed prudent after he attacked you.  He’ll sleep for some time.”

“Good, I really don’t need him underfoot right now.  The nano probes can’t secrete enough buffered analgesic to compensate for the headache his presence is causing me.  I think we should head out to your crash site, Nina.  One more item to cross off my list.  House, while we’re gone, I’d like you to review the DV of our misadventure at McMullin’s.  See if you can find anything I might have missed.”

“Very well.”

“DV from the recon parlor?” asked Nina.

“My optical implants record everything, and my PDI sends it over to House real-time.  It’s handy when I want to review an interview or a crime scene.”

“You tell your girlfriends about this little feature?”

“I’m not actually seeing anyone right now.  Not seriously, anyway.”

“That’s not my point.”

“I only use it when I’m working.  Not to worry.  I turned it off during our little heart-to-heart on the zeppelin.”

Nina didn’t look satisfied.

CHAPTER 10

YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY

Marlowe opted for a brief nap before they headed out.  Actually, he didn’t opt for it, House insisted, given the abuse his body had suffered in the last few hours.  Marlowe tried to protest, wondered aloud who would entertain Nina if he slept, but House assured him he could keep her occupied and answer any of her questions.  After all, Marlowe had to check with House for the answers to most of her questions anyway.

He’d only planned to sleep for twenty minutes, and had been very firm with House about setting the alarm, but when Marlowe returned to the world of consciousness, two hours had passed.  It was mid afternoon, and he was annoyed he’d slept so long, but clearly his body and House had conspired together, deciding he needed the rest.  He splashed some water on his face and wolfed down a couple of Volume bars.  Nina had passed the time chatting with House, and professed a greater understanding of and comfort with her new world.  Despite the excruciating pain in his legs, Marlowe felt positively nimble, a fact he grudgingly attributed to the extra sleep he’d been forced to get.  The bones were taking a little longer than normal to knit, but House reassured him that was just a sign of old age.

Before Nina would leave, she insisted on some way to be included in Marlowe’s conversations with House while out in the field.  Marlowe sighed, and tried to remember if he had anything that would help along those lines.  House reminded him of the childhood toys in the attic.

“I believe you have a ChromeMagnum Man Detecting Kit up there somewhere.”

“ChromeMagnum Man Detecting Kit?  What could that primitive getup possibly have that would be helpful?  A low-powered BB gun, fake low-light goggles that just shine green light on everything, and a disappearing, reappearing ink pen.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of the wrist communicator that came with it.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.”

Nina had assumed a confused but tired expression again.  “Any chance you’ll explain this to me?”

“I have an old detective kit that my brother and I used when we were growing up.  It has a couple of wrist communicators in it that we’d used to talk to each other while he hunted for me in one of the labyrinths under City Hall.  Well, he taunted me more than talked.  Until father took the dogs away.  Being chased by an older brother with a goldfish in a mechanized mobile tank wasn’t quite as fear-inspiring as being tracked down by a pack of rabid dogs, so the taunts seemed funnier.  And I didn’t have to get all those shots anymore after being found.”

“You know, I had an older brother growing up.  He was mean to me too, when we were younger.  He eventually outgrew it and we became good friends.”

“My brother hasn’t outgrown his vicious phase yet.  Maybe in a few years.”

Marlowe dreaded the thought of going through the attic.  The dusty cramped space just didn’t appeal to him.  His back spasmed just thinking about it.  Still, it had to be done if he wanted to keep Nina happy.  So he sighed and dug the FindIt Bot out of the closet.  The FindIt Bot was a plastic silver dome set on large, oversized treads, with a short gunmetal gray eye stalk extending from the center of the dome.  Just below the eye stalk, on either side, two telescoping arms rested in an upright position, a suction cup on the end of one, a clamp on the other.  Less than half a meter tall, the robot had half-circular sensors placed all around the bottom half, just above the treads.

 Marlowe carried the long forgotten robot up to the attic entrance, and then came back downstairs.  Already, beads of sweat were forming on his brow.  He caught his breath while a bemused Nina watched, then moved back to the closet where he wheeled out the FindIt Remote Control station.  It was much smaller than he remembered as he squeezed behind the controls.  He didn’t understand why the remote control station was built so small, though he suspected the ‘For Ages 6 to 8!’ labeling plastered across the front of it offered a major clue.  He flipped dust-covered toggles, tugged grimy joysticks stiff with disuse, and pressed cobweb-covered buttons until he’d maneuvered the FindIt Bot into the attic, watching its progress on a tiny screen inside the control station.  The FindIt Bot bounced up and down roughly as it moved among the boxes and crates stored upstairs.  The x-ray vision minimized the number of boxes Marlowe had to open remotely, which was important given how clumsy the ‘hands’ on the robot were, and also enabled him to kill a large rat he encountered behind a stack of his dad’s old sports magazines.  

Half an hour later, the FindIt Bot and its control station were back in the closet, Marlowe was stretching a kink out of his neck, and Nina was admiring the oversized, chrome-plated wrist communicator on her wrist.  It had a thick metal band, and a flat face with a grille on it.

“How does it work?”

“You just listen.  House turns it on remotely when he wants to talk to you.”

“And what do I do if I want to talk back?”

“Just talk.  The microphone is always on.”

“That seems pretty simple.”

“It should be.  It’s a child’s toy.  Now can we go?”

“Yes, now we can go.  I just hope they haven’t disturbed the ship too much, or taken anything of mine.”

“Hold it!”  Marlowe’s father appeared in the hallway, wearing flowing white flannel pajamas.  He looked much more presentable now, the wispy beard now a well-trimmed goatee and his hair pulled back into a pony tail, though the bundle bristled with split ends.  However, one thing ruined the overall sense of sanity: his roughly hewn, ragged mustache had been replaced with a smooth, unblemished upper lip on the side accidentally shortened earlier by the knife, but the other half hung down neatly clipped but unrepentant.  “Nobody leaves without me.  I’ve been cooped up long enough already.”

“Father, I think it’s best you stay here.”

“Yes,” broke in House.  “No doubt the medical authorities are on the lookout for you.  You’re safe here with me, but if you wander outside, they might find you and take you back.”

“Never!  Never!  I’ll never go back!”  Former Governor Jebediah rose to his full height, head held high.  “I’ll die before they take me back, and I’ll kill as many people around me as I can!”

“All the more reason to keep you here, father, given that you’d otherwise be traveling in our company.”

“I’ll turn this place inside out if you leave me here.  I’ll tear the walls down with my bare hands.  I’ll set the toilets on fire.  I’ll mow the carpets.”

“No.  House, why don’t you give him another sedative.”

“No!  I’ll…I’ll…I’ll be quiet and keep out of the way if you let me come.  I promise.  Please.”  Jebediah’s head had slumped, and his shoulders slouched, his eyes brimming with tears.  “I’ll get on my hands and knees and beg.  Please.”

“No.”

“Marlowe, come on, why not?”  The pleading had no effect on Marlowe, but evidently Nina consisted of less stern stuff.  “You can leave him locked in the car when we get to the ship, can’t you?  Look at him.”

“I swear, I’ll be as quiet as a mouse…son.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I can always sedate him remotely,” whispered House into Marlowe’s ear.  “And being outside might do him a world of good.”

Marlowe looked from the puppy dog eyes of his father to the compassion-filled gaze of Nina.  “Fine, but no trouble.  Not a peep.”

Jebediah jumped up and down.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you, son!  Oh, I won’t cause a lick of trouble, you’ll see.  Heck, I’ll even be helpful.  Yes, that’s it.  I’ll help you with whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Just don’t cause a ruckus and I’ll be satisfied.”

“Deal!  Shake on it?”  Jebediah extended his hand.  “As Governor, my word is my bond.”

Marlowe stared at the extended hand, then took it reluctantly, pulling away from the grasp as soon as possible.  “You know, you’re not Governor anymore.”

Jebediah’s eyes narrowed.  “We’ll see about that.  Oh yes, we’ll see about that.”  He cackled, a disturbing effect considering he only had half of a Fu Manchu mustache now, and Marlowe began to reconsider his decision.  

“Oh, and you’ll have to shave off the other half of your mustache.  That look hasn’t been in style for several years and will attract too much attention.”

“But, but, do you know how long it took me to grow that mustache?  It’s who I am now!  It’s a symbol of my ability to survive, to weather all hardships!  To shear off the battered but still standing side would be tantamount to murdering my soul!  Bad enough I had to shave the one side, but I can’t stand to lose the other!”  Jebediah stroked the remaining half protectively.

“Either it goes,” intoned Marlowe firmly, “or you stay.  Consider shaving it off as another hardship you have to endure.”

Jebediah stroked the tips of his fingers with the end of the mustache.  “Do I have to recycle it?  Can I at least hold onto it as a keepsake?”

Marlowe felt another headache coming on.  The nano probes silently released a buffered analgesic to combat the encroaching pain.  “If that’s what it takes to get you to shave it off right now, then yes, you can keep it.”

Jebediah raised his head high and walked back to his room.  Two minutes later, wiping a stray tear from his eye, he returned, his upper lip now completely bare.  “The deed is done.  I hope you’re satisfied.”

Before Marlowe could respond, Jebediah marched out the front door, staring straight ahead.  Marlowe followed, Nina in tow.

By the time they caught up with him, Jebediah had shed the imperious demeanor and was hopping up and down on the front bumper of the Studebaker, bouncing the entire car.  The car tooted angrily as it groaned under the stress of the gyrations.

“Get in, father.”

“Door’s locked.”

“The back door isn’t.”

“But I want to drive!”

“No.”

“But I want to drive!”

“What did you promise about not causing trouble?”

“But I want to drive!”

Nina stepped in, trying a different tack.  “Do you know where we’re going?”

“No, but the car does.”

“So the car would be driving then, right?”

Jebediah paused, sensing some sort of trap, but not being in any kind of mental state that could avoid it.  “Yes….”

“So you wouldn’t be driving anyway, right?”

Jebediah frowned.  “Um, no, I guess I wouldn’t be-”

“So why not stretch out in the back seat, where you’ll have much more room and be comfortable?”

Jebediah thought about it for a moment.  “I guess that’s OK.”

Marlowe reasserted himself.  “Then it’s all settled.  Let’s go.”  

Nina seemed excited too, bobbing up and down in her seat as they pulled out into the street, like a kid being driven to the candy store.

Marlowe gestured back to Jebediah with his thumb.  “He’s half crazy and hopped up on drugs, so I can see why he’s excited.  Why are you so happy to be heading back to the crash site?”

“I’m not crazy!  I’m merely mentally indisposed right now!”

“Of course you aren’t.  Marlowe is just being a little insensitive.”  Nina gave Marlowe a  sharp poke.  “Someone is forgetting about karma.”  Nina cleared her throat.  “I’m so eager to get back to my ship because I didn’t really have a chance to survey the damage, see how well it held up.  Plus, if they really haven’t moved or messed about with it, I have some things on board that will prove who I am.”

“What sorts of things?”

“Some data disks with pictures, crew logs, survey data.  I wasn’t going to come back after all that distance completely empty-handed.  That would have meant our mission was a total failure.”

“I see.  Well, despite my little snooze, I’m still tired.”  Marlowe tossed a quick look back at his father.  “I can’t imagine what could possibly be wearing me out.  Wake me when we get there.”

Marlowe leaned his seat back and closed his eyes, but didn’t sleep.  He listened instead.

“House, can you hear me?” asked Nina.

“Yes, ma’am,” House replied from the wrist communicator she wore.  “I should say, I’ve taken the liberty of encrypting our conversation, even though you didn’t ask.  It seemed prudent.  I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, not at all.  I was thinking.  You’re a computer.  Maybe you can help.”

“Maybe?”  Marlowe could have sworn House’s tone was amused.  “I’ll certainly do my best.”

“Well, can’t you do a search for the Odyssey mission on the Net?”

“The CityNet?  No, I’m afraid any information on the net would only go back as far as the founding of the City.”

“No, not a city net.  The Net.”

“The Net?”

“Are we there yet?”  Jebediah, rocking back and forth in his seat so hard the Doppler shift could be detected in his speech.

“No, not yet,” said Marlowe, opening his eyes.

“When we gonna get there?”

“Soon,” said Marlowe firmly.  “Now please, I’m trying to sleep.”  He settled back into the seat and closed his eyes.

Jebediah was silent for a moment, and then asked tentatively, “I was wondering if we might make a small detour-”

“No!”