The Further Adventures of Batman (6 page)

“I’m interested in the ARDC corporation.”

Lopez nodded. “Good solid output with a first-class reputation. Red Murphy’s the chief ramrod on that spread, Mr. Morrison. You’d like him. He looks a little like Spencer Tracy, only not so pretty.”

“I’d like to meet him. Today.”

“Let’s find a telephone,” Lopez said.

Lopez found a phone in the airport and called. He left the booth shaking his head.

“I don’t know what’s getting into Murphy,” he said. “Must be getting old.”

“What’s the matter?” Bruce asked.

“I spoke to his personal secretary. She said that Murphy isn’t seeing anyone at the moment.”

“For how long?”

“She couldn’t say. Just that he was very occupied with important matters.” Lopez scratched his chin, thinking. “Let me make another call.”

Ten minutes later he had further news.

“I called Ben Braxton. I don’t think you ever met him, Mr. Morrison. He’s chief editor of the main newspaper here, The Ogdensville Bugle. I’ve done him a few favors in my time and he was glad to fill me in on Murphy. It’s all public knowledge anyhow, but it saves us from having to dig it out of the newspaper’s morgue. It seems that Murphy has been acting oddly for the past several weeks. He has a suite in the factory complex, you know, and he moved in there recently, him and his wife. Her name’s Lavinia. She’s a fine woman, Mr. Morrison.”

“So they’re both living in the ARDC factory complex?”

“That’s right. And they haven’t come out. They talk to family members by telephone from time to time. But they haven’t been seeing anyone. Not even their son, Dennis, who was in town recently on his way to South America. He’s a fire-fighting specialist and spends most of his time on the road. But Murphy wouldn’t even see him. It’s very curious.”

“Curious indeed,” Bruce said. “Well, Finley, let’s have some lunch. I’ll just have time to catch the evening flight back to Gotham City.”

“You’re going to come and go just like that? Come on, Mr. Morrison! Why don’t you tell me what this is all about.”

“It isn’t about anything,” Bruce said. “I’ve gotten some information about ARDC and I was considering making a large investment in the company. I thought I’d talk to Murphy, see what I think of him, before tying up capital. But if it can’t be done at this time, it’ll keep. You got any place good to eat around here?”

“Indeed we do!” Lopez said. “I hope you like barbecue, Mr. Morrison, because one of the finest restaurants in the state is just a few miles outside of town.”

The restaurant, Las Angelitas de Tejas, was a beautifully restored building in Spanish colonial style. They ate on the broad terrace, overlooking the formal gardens that the restaurant maintained at great expense. Bruce ate enough of the fiery and savory barbecue to satisfy his host. Bruce’s own taste was more for diets high in fiber and nuts, with plenty of salad and vegetables on the side. But he didn’t want to insult Lopez’s native cuisine.

Lopez drove him back to the airport and saw him aboard the four
P.M.
flight to Gotham City with a stopover in Kansas City.

When the plane reached Kansas City, Bruce got off and booked a private plane to take him back to Ogdensville. He arrived just after dark. His luggage was still there, in the locker where he had left it.

The ARDC complex occupied several hundred square acres of flat desert close to Ogdensville. It was surrounded by a double barrier of electrified fence. Armed guards patroled the perimeter at all hours.

At night, the place looked uncanny with its guard towers spaced every hundred yards, the entire line of fence brilliantly illuminated by searchlights. It looked like a concentration camp in the American desert.

Bruce Wayne, who had been Charlie Morrison, now became Batman. And Batman was not too impressed.

In his line of work, fighting some of the most ingenious and well-financed criminals the world had ever known, he had on many occasions had to get into places of strong security; places whose owners had gone to considerable expense and ingenuity to make Batmanproof.

ARDC would not be easy, but it was a long way from impossible.

Batman’s first attempt was on the north side of the complex. Here, several of the floodlights had gone out; a sign of carelessness that might in itself mean something. Carrying a heavy suitcase of equipment with him, Batman observed the guards’ routine for a while. Blending perfectly into the night, and with the gift of total immobility when he so desired, Batman watched for almost two hours.

He concluded that it would be difficult to get through the wire without someone noticing. The guards’ paths meshed too well to allow even the ten minutes or so he would need to neutralize the electricity and get through the wire.

He turned his attention to burrowing beneath. Taking a small but powerful mass detector from his suitcase, he took an underground profile of the surrounding land to a depth of a hundred feet.

As he had feared, the ARDC security people had invested in an advanced sensing alarm system, which would detect movements in the earth to a depth of fifty feet. He would have to give up any thought of going under the wire. He would need earthmoving equipment if he wanted to get below the level of the detectors.

He decided that this break-in might not be as easy as he had expected.

He stood in the darkness and thought for a while, a tall, awe-inspiring figure dressed in black from head to toe. Even the little peaked ears of his costume seemed to be standing stiff in concentration.

At last he made up his mind. It was risky, but he had undergone worse.

Billy-Joe Namon and Steve Kingston were on the northeastern quadrant that night. Even in their dark blue guards’ uniforms they looked like what they were—out-of-work cowboys filling in the time between rodeos with any work they could find. Guarding the place for Old Man Murphy was not bad work. Murphy was a fair man and he paid a decent wage. The only trouble with the job was, it was boring. So highly evolved were the protective systems that surrounded the factory that no one ever tried to get in. Night after night it was the same: the soft hiss of the desert wind, the occasional howl of a coyote, and nothing else. Ever.

Except for tonight.

Tonight was different. It began with a loud hissing sound that seemed to come from the desert.

“You ever heard anything like that?” Billy-Joe asked.

“Might be a gut-shot bear,” Steve said.

“I doubt it. Not this far south.”

They listened. The sound increased in intensity. Then a light appeared in the sky in front of them. It pulsed, a bright electric violet, unlike anything either man had ever seen before.

“You know,” Billy-Joe said, “I don’t like this one little bit.”

“What’s it up to now?” Steve asked.

The violet light had begun to move, traveling in easy swoops back and forth across the sky, coming closer and closer to the perimeter fence.

“You think we should shoot it down?” Steve asked. He had already cleared his sidearm.

“Don’t go gettin’ nervous,” Billy-Joe said. “Ain’t even nothin’ to shoot at yet. Let it get a little closer.”

They watched as the brilliant violet light advanced toward them. Billy-Joe had picked up his submachine gun. He clicked off the safeties as the violet light came directly overhead.

Then it burst into dazzling light like the simultaneous bursting of a million flashbulbs. At the same time it gave off a deafening noise like a howitzer going off about five feet from them.

Both men fell down, stunned and blinded. They got to their feet quickly, rubbing their eyes and trying to regain sight.

There was a field telephone ringing nearby. It was from the southern quadrant guardpost, several miles away on the other side of the perimeter fence. The guards there had picked up the noise and flash and wanted to know what was going on.

Billy-Joe pulled himself together enough to make a report.

“Cal,” he said to the southern quadrant guard, “I hate to tell you this because you’re going to call me a liar, but I think we just saw a UFO close up.”

“My aunt May saw one of those last year,” Cal said. “They are the dangdest things, aren’t they?”

“Cal, I’m telling you, that’s what we saw near as we can tell.”

“Oh, I believe you,” Cal said. “But I guess we’d better go on full alert just in case you boys been hittin’ the bottle or chewing on devil weed.”

Four Jeeps full of armed men roared out of the motor pool. They raced around the inner perimeter, helping out the Jeeps’ headlights with handheld searchlights. They came across plenty of tumbleweed but nothing else.

Nothing they were able to spot, that is.

Darkness and silence again. No sounds but the moaning desert wind and the occasional call of a coyote.

No movement on the fenced-in land of the inner perimeter except for the wind, rippling the grass that the ARDC Corporation maintained at so high a cost.

Grass rippling in the dark.

Something flowing across the dark grass.

Something dark, shapeless, large, moving in a zigzag fashion, coming closer and closer to the main buildings.

In the high watchtower, Steve was watching the grass. There was something a little funny about it tonight. But that was the wind, blowing it back and forth in sudden flaws, taking unexpected turns and reversals, until you could almost swear there was someone or something moving through it.

But that was crazy.

Nothing could get through the fence.

“What you looking at?” Billy-Joe remarked beside him.

“Just watching the grass,” Steve said.

“Old buddy,” Billy-Joe said, “we’re paid to look outside the perimeter, not inside. We already know there’s nothing inside.”

“Nothing except us chickens,” Steve said, grinning.

Us chickens. And a very large bat.

Promptly at midnight, the Captain of the ARDC guards, Blaise Connell, a former Texas Ranger, reported to Red Murphy in his suite.

“Everything OK, Mr. Murphy.”

“Thank you, Blaise. What was that bright flash a couple of hours ago?”

Although Murphy’s suite was deep within the ARDC complex, and had no window to the outer world, Red Murphy had picked up the flash on one of the banks of tv monitors that were the eyes of the perimeter surveillance system.