Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (32 page)
Read Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs Online
Authors: Mike Resnick,Robert T. Garcia
Damn. Would this kid call his bluff?
“
Thr—
”
“At the far end of the warehouse!” the kid blurted. “The back end. Nobody goes in that way. Well, almost nobody.”
Billy wondered if he really would have shot the kid at the count of three. He was glad he hadn’t had to find out. “Who’s holding him?”
“Jake Orgen’s gang.”
The mucker had heard of them. “The Little Augies?”
“Yeah.”
“How many?”
“Four, maybe five.”
“Orgen hisself in there?”
The kid shook his head. “He don’t like bein’ around the blood-and-thunder stuff. He’s the brains.”
Billy thought that over. Then he looked into a young face drawn with despair and said, “Don’t go thinkin’ you’re a stoolie, Legs. Not unless they gave you so much dough you feel beholden.”
“A whole buck. That’s good money.”
“Not dying-over money.”
“No. Not that.” The kid sniffed and hung his head.
Billy squatted next to the boy. “Look, it ain’t my place to tell you whether to hang with these lowlifes or not.”
The kid looked confused.
“But you done good. You held out when most others woulda long since caved.”
“But . . . but I ratted.”
“You didn’t owe them nothing.”
“But I
ratted
.”
Well, he’d tried. Rising, Billy said, “You get your ass home. I see you followin’ me, I will drill you between the damn eyes.”
The kid nodded, frowning, because the mucker’s tone hadn’t been as strong as his words.
“Those guys in there?” Billy nodded toward his goal. “They ain’t never gonna know from me that it was you told me where to find them. Far as they know—in the unlikely event any of ’em live through me comin’ to call—I just tracked ’em down my own self.”
“Why you protectin’ me, mister?”
“Let’s just say once upon a time, I stood where you do now. I coulda been good, but I chose to be bad.”
The kid didn’t seem to understand.
“Look where it got me. I’m on the docks in the middle of a beautiful Saturday night pointin’ a pistol at a kid and gettin’ ready to go free a man who thinks the world would be a better place if your buddies were to fill me full of lead.”
The kid seemed confused, and why shouldn’t he? Young Legs Diamond had had his bell rung pretty good, including a broken damn nose, and Billy knew this little wiseguy would eventually do whatever he felt like, anyway.
“So they call you ‘Legs’ ’cause you’re so damn fast?”
“I am good and damn fast, mister.”
Billy let him see the gun again. “Show me.”
The kid got off and ran like hell back toward the city.
Making his way down the long wall of the warehouse, night surrounding him now, water lapping at the pier, Billy actually felt at home. This river rat’s paradise certainly was no place for Barbara Harding; but the mucker felt like he had just come home from some nameless war, ready to do combat again.
At last, he came to a dingy window. He had to stand on his toes to see in, and the dirty glass made it hard to see. But there in plain view, under one naked lightbulb hanging like the condemned from a scaffold, sat William Mallory—still in his fifty-dollar suit, bound tightly to a straight-back wooden chair. Five feet away, four guys sat around a table playing cards. Even through the filth, Billy could see the guns on the table amid the money and cards.
As Billy headed to the back, he could hear shoes scraping just around the corner. Peeking, he saw a lookout lumbering toward him, a lookout who was no damn kid. The mucker waited and, when the big oaf got to the corner, doubled him over with a right, then knocked him cold with a rabbit punch left. The guy went down like a sack of wheat and, after a kick in the head, was just as motionless.
Billy stepped over him and stood before the door, gun in hand. If he could do just this one thing, and do it right, he could give Barbara a shot at happiness in that foreign world she was accustomed to . . .
He took a long, deep breath, blew it out, and kicked the door open. The guy on the far side of the table rose first and for that won the prize of a red-as-lipstick kiss-pucker bullet hole in the chest, falling over backward, fingers never finding the gun on the table. The goon to the fallen guy’s left did manage to grab his gun, but that was all, a bullet tearing into his gut and sitting him down, on the floor not his chair; then he sprawled and twitched and bled and worked on dying. The kidnapper with his back to the door rolled out of his chair to the right, a bullet kicking up cement from the floor as he slipped behind a crate, gun in hand.
This all gave one other thug time to rise, seize his pistol, and fire a round that clipped Billy’s shoulder, tearing more material than skin.
Billy swivelled and fired a round that gouged a hole in a wooden beam as the goon slipped behind it.
Two down, two to go . . . and only two bullets left.
Deuces were wild in this game, it seemed.
The one behind the crate was up now, grinning in a face dirty with a several day-old beard, his gun pressed to the temple of the trussed-up William Mallory.
“Drop yer gun, laddiebuck, or the swell gets it in his noodle!”
Billy had come so close. Now he had one to his left and one to his right . . . and the latter had a gun to Mallory’s head.
He was glad the wild-eyed, squirming Mallory was gagged—whatever the man had to say, Billy didn’t want to hear it. Other than looking like an unmade bed, the gent appeared to be otherwise unharmed. Billy hoped to keep it that way, but was unsure about how. Just getting out alive his own damn self was looking dicey . . .
“I told you to
drop
it, boyo!”
Billy let his weight sag and let his aim drop from the man holding the gun to Mallory’s head.
“All right,” Billy said, sounding defeated. It wasn’t hard to act that part. “All right . . .”
Billy started to squat as if to lay the gun carefully on the floor.
The thug at Mallory’s left grinned wider.
As the weapon reached his waist, Billy brought the barrel up slightly, then fired. The bullet hit the goon in one eye, leaving surprise in the other, as the gunman slumped dead to cement and the bound Mallory just sat there.
Even before the smoke had cleared, Billy rolled left as the remaining goon fired a shot past him.
The one thing Billy hadn’t counted on was the gut-shot goon finding the strength to rejoin the fight. Billy practically rolled right into him as the gut-shot man pulled the trigger. Something hot burned as it slipped past Billy’s right side, carving flesh. The two men rolled together now, and Billy used his last shot to give the guy a second shot to the gut. This one killed the bastard, but the remaining goon got off two more shots, each just barely missing Billy.
Grabbing the dead man’s pistol, Billy turned and fired twice, the first shot parting the man’s hair, the second punching a hole damn-near dead center in his forehead. That was the shot that dropped him dead to the cement.
Rushing to Mallory, Billy pulled off the man’s gag and started cutting the ropes with his jackknife.
“Byrne,” Mallory gasped. “Where the hell did
you
come from?”
“Chicago, originally,” Billy said coolly. “Thought you knew that.”
Mallory shook his head, dazed, shaken.
Billy asked, “Can you walk?”
“I’m fine,” Mallory said, nodding. “I’m fine. A little roughed up, but shipshape.”
Billy severed the last of the man’s bindings. “Then we need to get out of here. Orgen may be coming to finish you off, once he realizes there’s no ransom being paid. Or the coppers will show ’cause of the gunfight. Either way, it would be better if we weren’t around.”
“Agreed,” Mallory said. “But you’re bleeding, man! Your shoulder, your side . . .”
Billy shook his head. “These are nothin’. Now, move!”
Once they were well clear of the Chelsea Piers, the two men finally slowed to a walk.
On a darkened street, with no one else in sight, the night growing a little chilly, Mallory put his hand on Billy’s sleeve and stopped him.
“Look,” Mallory said. “Uh . . . what can I say but ‘thank you?’”
Billy couldn’t look at the man. “I didn’t do it for you.”
“I know. You did it for her.”
They walked on, slowly now.
“Why?” Mallory said.
“You got it right the first time.”
“No I mean—why did you telephone me? And send me to her?”
Stopping, Billy made himself look into the man’s eyes. “Same answer.”
Mallory nodded slowly. “Okay. Just so you know—I won’t let you down. By not letting
her
down. Understood?”
“Understood. ’Cause if you don’t do right by her? What I gave those goons back there won’t be nothin’ compared to the medicine you take from me.”
“That thought doesn’t scare me as much as the thought of letting her down.”
Billy smiled, just a little. “We have that much in common.”
They walked in silence for almost a block.
Finally, Billy said, “Find the nearest police station. Tell them what happened. Tell them some hardcase did all that back there at the piers, and you have no idea who the hell it was. Musta been some rival gang. Do you get me?”
“I get you. You were never there.”
“I knew you were smarter than you look.”
“Where will you go? What should I tell Barbara?”
“I have something to take care of back home,” Billy said. He handed Harding’s pistol over to Mallory. “Tell Barbara to tell her father thanks for use of the hog leg. I’m just sorry I couldn’t clean it and reload it before returning it.”
Mallory stared at Billy. “Byrne, you are an odd man. I don’t think I will ever know what to make of you.”
Billy shrugged. “Haven’t you figured me yet? I’m just a mucker.”
And they went their separate ways.
If this is the longest of the original stories in this book, that’s only logical—for of all of ERB’s fantastic worlds, less is known about Poloda than any other. Now, thanks to Todd McCaffrey, who took a sabbatical from the wildly popular Pern series to write this, our knowledge has increased considerably.
—Mike
To the Nearest Planet
As told to Todd McCaffrey
As everyone knows, the craziest place in the world is the United States. Of course, in the US, everyone will say, “We’re not crazy! It’s those people in California!”
Californians will say, “No, it’s the people in Los Angeles.”
In Los Angeles they’ll argue the point. Not about that L.A. is the craziest place on Earth, but over which exact
place
in L.A. is the craziest. Some say Hollywood, some say Venice Beach.
Others say, “It’s the Valley, man!” They’ll mean the San Fernando Valley, of course. Home to Universal Studios, ABC and NBC, Disney Studios, Warner Brothers—it’s probably hard to argue the point.
But even in the Valley, there’s still disagreement. Some will say Burbank, others will say Chatsworth, still others will say Woodland Hills—and all have their reasons.
There is, however, a strong argument for Tarzana. It’s the township that was originally bought by the famous Edgar Rice Burroughs and named in honor of his famed character, Tarzan. Mr. Burroughs had the idea of setting up an artists’ and writers’ community, which sadly (though predictably) failed, leaving the city to rise from its ashes.
Nowadays it’s hard to separate Tarzana from the rest of the Valley, but there are a few places.
Like the old pawn shop I came across the other day as I was browsing through some of the back streets of the city. What caught my eye was the old typewriter in the window.
I’m a writer, and while I’m thoroughly grounded in the 21st century and you can have my Apple when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands, I still had a soft spot for the old manual typewriters. People liked to say that back then was when the
real
stories were written—pounded out on the keyboard and written on carbon paper, stuffed hopefully into envelopes and sent out to sink or swim in the rags of the day.
I love my computer, love its autocorrect function, its ability to tell me exactly how many words I’ve written and how many of them are spelled properly. But I live in the San Fernando Valley, at the very top part, in the wild northeast of Chatsworth, which is technically outside of the City of Los Angeles proper and only lingers on as part of the county.
Chatsworth has the dubious distinction of the being the porn capital of the world—something I only discovered after I moved there and noticed the sort of clientele that could be seen at the local coffee shops where I did much of my work—and it also had the distinction of being a place that suffered more than its fair share of earthquakes, fires . . . and power outages.
So that typewriter spoke volumes to me. It said, “Look, you can write when the power’s out! You can find a cigar and chomp on it, get a pipe and look serious. Pound out your words.”
So I went in the shop. When I asked about it, the shopkeeper got a funny look in his eye, and then he brightened. “It’s like new!” he said as he extolled its virtues.
“If new is a hundred years old, you’re probably right,” I said. But what the hell. “How much do you want for it?”
“You wanna buy it?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” I said.
“Five bucks and it’s yours.”
“Five bucks?” That seemed way too cheap. I turned to where it stood in the shop window. “Does it work?”
“Of course it does!” he told me. “I just put in a new ribbon.” I frowned. “I’ll throw in a ream of paper, too!”
“Sold!” A ream of paper was worth five bucks all by itself.
“I’ll get the paper, you get the typewriter,” he said, scurrying into the back.
It was a bit of a hassle lugging the heavy machine out from the shop window, but not all that difficult—I didn’t see why the shop owner couldn’t have done it himself, but maybe that was why he only wanted five bucks—my labor was part of the bargain.
He came back with a pristine ream of paper. The ream was wrapped with a ribbon but the paper seemed in perfect condition.
“Here you go!” he said, slapping the paper on the typewriter and pushing the set at me.
“Don’t you want your money?”
“Oh . . . sure,” he said, taking the five dollar bill from me and slapping it on the counter. As I picked up the typewriter and the paper, he said to me, “Only thing: no refunds.”
“It works, doesn’t it?” I demanded, ready to throw it back on the counter.
“It works, I swear!” the guy said. His eyes didn’t meet mine as he added, “Only, I have had it in the shop too long. I don’t want it back.” I frowned and he added hastily, “The missus doesn’t like it, you see.”
This guy looked many things, married wasn’t one of them. But . . . five bucks and a ream of paper. What could go wrong?
I was eager to get my new find ensconced in my apartment, so I rushed home and up the stairs and into my one bedroom studio. I’m a writer, didn’t I say? Besides, I had alimony to pay.
I pushed some stuff off the coffee table in front of my defunct TV—an old tube type—and set the typewriter down.
I undid the ribbon on the paper, stuffed a sheet in, cranked the roller until the sheet was in front of the keys, and started typing.
“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazzy dog.” Hmm, the
z
key was sticky. I played with it, got it to work properly after filling up a row with
z
’s and then sat back, ready to write the greatest American novel.
Nothing.
I looked at the typewriter. I looked at the paper. I looked at the paper some more. I pulled it out and held it up to the light. It was really good paper. It was watermarked. The watermark was “ERB.”
ERB? Edgar Rice Burroughs? No, I thought to myself. Any paper made for him would have been used up long ago.
All the same . . . now it was hard to break that clean, watermarked paper. It could wait for another day. My trusty ol’ Apple would do just fine.
I left the typewriter and went to my office. That is, I went from the coffee table to my bedroom and the desk I had there. I fired up the computer, checked my mail, found something interesting on the Internet, and, before you knew it, it was dinner time.
I ate quickly, wanting to get back—or at least “get”—to work, but I just wasn’t in the mood. I was tired from my outing, and my bed looked too comfortable.
Just a nap
, I told myself as I lay down.
You know . . . to think.
I awoke to a strange noise. It was coming from the living room. I looked around. It was dark. Some nap!
Tap. Clatter. Tap. What was the noise? Burglars? Someone nuts enough to want an old TV? I crept out of bed, found my baseball bat, and moved out into the living room, ready for anything.
Except that I found nothing. I turned on the light and shouted out a “Ha!” to scare anyone but there was no one there. I looked around, checked the bathroom, all the out-of-the-way places and then came back to the living room. Nothing. No one.
Maybe it was the pipes or the guy next door. Tapping on the walls or something.
I turned back to my room, ready to put down the bat and crawl back into bed, when—Tap!
I turned back and my eyes followed the sound. The typewriter. I picked up the bat again and moved around the couch to the typewriter.
The platen—the rubber roller on which you put paper—was empty. But a key was up—no, two keys stuck together! Someone was fooling with me. But whom? My last girlfriend had thrown her keys to the apartment in the sewer—no one else had keys except the super and I didn’t think he was that crazy—crazy, yes, just not
that
crazy, nor, come to think of it, anywhere near that bright.
I unjammed the keys and sat in front of the typewriter, trying to think. Maybe an earthquake had rattled the keys? A vibration of some sort, probably.
Then, as I sat there, one of the keys rose up and hit the platen with a woeful, desultory sound. I looked at the key. It was the letter ‘I’. The space bar thunked and another letter rose, too fast, jamming with the letter ‘
I
.’ It was the letter ‘
m
’. Another letter rose. ‘
U
.’
I brushed them all back and lifted up the typewriter above my head, peering up at the bottom of it to see if there was some mechanism controlling it. With all the silly “reality” shows nowadays, I might have found myself an unwilling participant in ‘
Ghost Writer’
or some such. The thought wasn’t all bad—I could use the money.
I could see the mechanism move again but saw no sign of how it was being made to move. I lowered the typewriter. The ‘
I
’ key again. Then the space, the ‘
m
’ and the ‘
u.
’
Okay, I decided, I’ll bite. I unjammed the keys, rolled in a piece of paper, and sat back.
What happened next was too weird to be anything from a reality TV show.
The typewriter keys clattered, slowly, then gained speed as if somehow aware of the paper.
“I must tell you.” The ghost writer tapped out. “I must tell you before it is too late.”
No matter how much it is considered bad writing, I can only say that a chill ran down my spine.
A ghost was writing to me. A ghost using ERB-watermarked paper. Could it be Edgar Rice Burroughs himself? Oh God, and what to do about copyright then? Do I sell it as my own, or do I claim it’s his?
The typewriter didn’t care about such things. It was writing steadily, hitting the return when it got to the end of a line and the bell dinged, and it continued to the end of the page. And then it stopped. I stared at it for a moment until it dawned on me—I fed it another piece of paper.
The typewriter started writing again. The first thing it did was tab to the right and put up the page number: 2.
As the typewriter continued, I picked up the first page and began to read.
I must tell you. I must tell you before it is too late. Your world is in danger. You must prepare. You must be ready. God forgive me, it is all my fault.
I was born on Earth and fought in the Second World War. The last I remember, my plane was diving toward the ground somewhere over Germany, having sent two before me to pay the ferryman.
When I awoke, I was on a new world. It took a while to learn the language and the culture. What I discovered was that my saviors were locked in a century-long war with their mortal enemy.
I joined their air force because I’d been a pilot and fought well—and I hoped to repay the kindness that I’d been shown. Finally I was entrusted with a mission of the gravest import: to infiltrate the enemy as a spy and steal their most secret technology, a power amplifier that could power a ship between planets.
The planets circling the sun of Omos were different from those of our own solar system. There were twelve of them, including Poloda, all equidistant in the same orbit only a million miles from their sun—a sun that was, obviously, much dimmer than our own. Further, these twelve planets: Poloda, Tonos, Yonda, Banos, Wunos, Zandar, Uvala, Sanada, Vanada, Rovos, and Antos (going counterclockwise) were enclosed by an atmosphere belt seventy-two hundred miles in diameter.