Unpopular Science

Chapter 45

“Howdy.” Margo, manager of Fastbinder’s Museum of Mechanical Marvels, greeted every customer who came through the door with a great big “Howdy.” It wasn’t an act, like the old farts who stood inside the Wal-Mart. Margo was the genuine article, friendly as all get-out.

“How-dee,” answered the little man in the robe that added a turquoise glow on his paper-thin flesh. The man was older than Margo’s grandma but standing upright, after all. He cocked his head, listening to the gift shop sound system and smiling.

“It’s the latest Molly Pardon. You a Molly admiree?”

“He only likes her for her cleavage,” said a much younger man who entered behind the Asian gentleman.

“Ms. Pardon is not as talented as Ms. Wylander—” the elderly man said conversationally, but he never finished.

“Oh, don’t. I just can’t take it today.” The younger man, who looked constipated or worse, turned on Margo and never even noticed he didn’t get a “Howdy.” “Looking for Fastbinder. Is he around?”

“No. You another lawyer?”

“Do I look like a lawyer?” The man spread his hands slightly and looked down at himself. He was in a crisp, pale yellow T-shirt and casual slacks. The shoes were nice but too much with the outfit.

“Well, maybe you look like a lawyer about to clean his garage,” Margo suggested.

The flesh on the forehead of the old Asian man wrinkled up, his mouth opened in delight and his green eyes positively danced.

“Heh, heh! A lawyer about to clean his garage. Heh, heh!”

The young man breathed out, and the words “oh, God,” were in all that exhaled air. The young man tromped off into the corner and glared into the security camera—the real one, hidden in a plastic fish, not the fake one over the cash register.

“A lawyer about to clean his garage,” the senior citizen repeated appreciatively.

“Do you have Tylenol?” the young man called.

“Sold out,” Margo said.

“Laudanum? Heroin? Cyanide?” The young man was holding his head as if it really hurt.

“My son is joking,” the old Asian explained. “This is what he thinks is funny. After all these years he does not notice that he laughs alone. Is Mr. Fastbinder available?”

“Sorry, sweetie. Gone to town,” Margo said. She was used to lying for Mr. F. So many nasty reporters came here to pester him that it wasn’t really like lying.

Both the men stopped, as if frozen in their tracks, then the young man said, “You’re right. Little Father. We flushed him.”

“What is that noise this time?” Chiun asked. “It is a vehicle, I think.”

“Hey, if tries to fly off, I’m not running after him,” the young one declared.

“I certainly shall not,” the old man said as they whisked out the door, so fast that Margo didn’t actually see them go. She began looking under the display counters.

Remo ran and the hot air was like a torch flame that singed his skin, but burned off some of the crust, too. It felt good to move like torrid wind in the Southwestern American desert. The headache receded.

He nodded to Chiun as they came upon the low, ugly building. Chiun gave him a last, concerned glance, then they separated. Remo circled right, Chiun left, looking for the source of the rumble. It didn’t sound like an aircraft, really, or a track. Maybe it was a bulldozer. Would Fastbinder try to escape in a bulldozer?

Anything short of a rocket, and Remo had him, and the heavy rumble of diesel engines sounded-nothing like a rocket. When he rendezvoused with Chiun on the far end of the building, the old man shook his head.

“I saw no signs of any vehicles.”

“Me, either, but he’s got something big inside there.” Remo said, eyeing the sand-worn brick warehouse. “He has to come out eventually, right?”

They circled to the delivery entrance, but the garage door remained shut. The rumble of machinery became intense, then there was a cracking and grinding like a controlled avalanche.

The saw nothing, but their feet could read the complaints of the very earth upon which they stood.

“Little Father, I don’t think Fastbinder even knows we’re here,” Remo said. “He’s too busy excavating a new root cellar.”

“This is not any type of mechanized shovel I know of.” Chiun said, frowning.

“Let’s check it out.”

Chiun’s gnarled fingers locked on Remo’s abnormally thick wrists. “No. I shall go.”

“Chiun, I’m fine. The headache’s fading.”

“Remo, I have learned a hard lesson from this Fastbinder. Have you learned nothing?”

“I learned they’re tough mothers with some really bad doodads. But take a whiff, Chiun, they’ve got none of the proton sense-erasers in action.”

Chiun didn’t release Remo. “Your words tell me you have indeed failed to learn the lesson. Did I not tell you before when we were at the home of the buffoon in Barcelona, to embrace your fear speck, to make use of it? Still you parade about, arrogant and speckless. Once again I tell you, Remo, that we do not know what surprises these Fastbinders have in store for us. Let our actions come from wisdom, and allow me to enter first.”

“Whoa, you had me there until the me-first part.”

“You are not recovered fully. If this weapon strikes us again, you will succumb more easily.”

“Wrong. You’re already more sensitive to that thing, Chiun. You have been since the first time we ran into it. Don’t give me that I’m-so-insulted pout, either.”

They stood in the hot sands, feeling the earth vibrate. “The funny thing is, if he’s digging a root cellar, he’s digging it really freaking fast. He must be down forty 1 feet already,” Remo observed. “I’m going in. Coming?”

Fastbinder watched the video feed from the security system, aghast at what he saw.

The bolt knobs on the blast-proof entrance doors turned and fell off. A tempered-steel chain, welded of half-inch links, kept the door from opening, but not for long. A hand came through the narrow opening and tapped the chain. Tapped it again in a different spot. Tapped it a third time, and the link crumbled.

The door swung open and there they were, the assassins. Fastbinder laughed bitterly—not an hour ago he was telling Whiteslaw to watch his back, and the assassins were already on their way to Fastbinder.

He fed more diesel into the engines and felt them increase their massive torque. He fretted over the controls, keeping the needles just under the red line.

“Tobor the Great at one o’clock,” Remo warned, but Chiun was upon the guard droid in a flash, disemboweling him with a slash of fingernails strong enough to whittle girders. The robot was a top-heavy rolling contraption with a fishbowl enclosing his whirling head components, and he spun out of control. Chiun snapped at the thing with one foot and the robot flew across the room, slammed into worktables, knocked over a hunk of metalworking machinery and tipped over, vanishing into oblivion.

More of them came, and Remo threw himself into the battle with one overriding goal—work fast, before any of them felt the need to recharge their systems. He slashed at them furiously, crushing their mechanical body parts, ripping out their motorized entrails. A chrome-plated sauna box with clothes-dryer exhaust hoses for arms was lifted and brought crashing down upon a rolling, wooden camel with spiraling eyes. The camel burst open and showered jagged strands of metal just as it was crushed. Remo stepped around the only two projectiles that escaped the explosion. The chrome robot moaned, swiveled its head and tried to raise one arm, snapping its pincers weakly. Remo kicked its skull clean off and it went limp.

There was an android clown that laughed nightmarishly as it tramped toward Remo on gear-driven spider legs. The helium-dispensing valve in its mouth was once used for inflating balloons at the circus. Now it dispensed hydrogen at Remo Williams, a clicking igniter bolted under its chin turning it into a flamethrower.

Remo was behind the clown before the flames got to where he had been. He bashed the clown in the head and his fist just kept plowing through the fiberglass body until the thing was demolished. The spider legs weren’t part of the clown’s original equipment. They kept right on walking. Remo smashed the motor and the gear box, then grabbed the biggest aluminum pieces and clapped them together with enough force to shatter them.

There was a sudden stillness. Remo almost didn’t trust that they had prevailed without a single incidence of proton unpleasantness. He felt the very air for further above-ground disturbances and found nothing.

“We dismantled them real good. We should be in Junkyard Wars.”

“I doubt that a contest named Junkyard Wars befits a Master of Sinanju.”

They cautiously crossed the old warehouse until they came to the great pit, the source of the continuing grinding vibration. The pit was surrounded with fresh, earthy sand. A heavy-duty ramp stood next to it, streaked with fresh grease, as if it had recently launched something directly into the earth.

Remo shook his head, amazed. Chiun was simply perplexed.

The fresh-dug tunnel was now more than sixty feet deep, and they could make out huge black metal gears that were channeling loose soil under a pair of rotating battering rams, which thrust away from each other on hydraulic thrusters and crushed the loose earth into the walls and ceiling of the tunnel.

“What is it?” the old man asked.

“Willy Wonka’s Mechanical Mole, from the look of it,” Remo said.

“Speak no nonsense. Simply explain.”

‘It’s a mechanical mole, Chiun. For riding into the earth. You know, Journey to the Earth’s Middle, Mahars, mushrooms big as mountains, Pat Boone as action-adventure hero.”

“Why do I ask you anything, ever?” Chirm demanded. “Are you trying to say Fastbinder is aboard that device? That he is attempting to escape us in this way?”

“Exactly,” Remo said. “Kind of cool, huh? I never knew anybody ever actually tried to build one of those contraptions. Looks unsafe.”

“Unsafe is an understatement.”

Remo said, “We have to stop him right away. What I if he’s headed for a cave system? They can go for miles.”

“You must pursue him immediately,” Chirm agreed.

“Okay. Here I go.”

Before Chiun could change his mind, Remo stepped into the open mouth of the pit and dropped, touched down lightly on the steep incline of the tunnel, stepped again and came to a stop just inches from the rotating pounders at the rear of the mechanical mole. Imbedded in the wall nearby was the fishbowl-headed robot who had been tossed in minutes before. Now he had the appearance of a Dodge Dart just emerged from the junkyard flattener.

Remo watched the half-moon-shaped hammers extend violently, in opposite directions, compressing the crumbling earth into a solid tunnel wall. It still didn’t look all that stable, and he had no intention of sticking around to see how long the tunnel would stay intact. He hit an extended hydraulic shaft with a thrust of his palm, then hit the other one. The shafts bent.

The hydraulics struggled to retract the shafts, and the result was a metal-on-metal death scream. Remo jogged out of the hole and joined Chiun on the ledge to watch the mechanical mole die.

“But what purpose did the hammer heads serve?” Chiun asked.

“Used to compact the soil excavated by the drills on the front of the mole,” Remo said. ‘This thing excavates and reinforces its own tunnel, so it doesn’t collapse. But the thing only has one big engine and it drives the drill and the pounder and everything in unison. So if one part freezes up, it all freezes up.”

A plume of smoke drifted to the surface, smelling of superheated metal.

“How do you know all this?” Chiun demanded.

“Read it in a book. When I was a kid. At the orphanage. You know, some science-adventure novel from years and years ago.”

In the stillness that followed the death of the mechanical mole they heard bolts turning and, through the haze, saw a small hatch swing open from the rear of the mechanical mole.

“I zurrender,” Jacob Fastbinder said through a fit of coughing, his accent more pronounced in his fear and lack of oxygen.

“We know,” Remo said.

“Zere is a rope up zere somewhere.”

“So what?”

Fastbinder stopped hacking and stared up at the entrance to the tunnel, mouth open to make breathing possible, but it was so dark and smoky he couldn’t see a thing.

Remo, standing on the lip of the hole, crushed his expensive Italian shoes into the earth and sent down a shower of sand.

Fastbinder spit it out “You vouldn’t!”

“Vee vould,” Remo replied. “Vouldn’t vee?”

“Vee most assuredly vould,” Chiun agreed with a sniff.

Fastbinder dived through the hatch in the mole and was still tightening the hatch bolts when Remo and Chiun stomped their feet in exactly the right spots. They stomped several more times, just to be sure, and by then they had stopped breathing because the air was thick with billowing dust. The tunnel was collapsing, again and again from the bottom up, until the place where it had been was only a sinkhole in the floor of the old warehouse.

They breathed again when they were outside, strolling leisurely to the Fastbinder’s Museum of Mechanical Marvels.

“Howdy!” Remo said.

“Hello.” Margo didn’t seem to care for him much.

‘Two, please. One regular person, one senior citizen. Show Margo your AARP card. Little Father. Is this the only Fastbinder museum, by the way?”

“Of course.”

“So we get to see all his collection, right? I mean, everything that’s not kept up at the house?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Just checking. You guys recycle? You know, tin cans, scrap metal, stuff like that?”

“No. Why?”

“Just checking.”

Margo handed them their tickets. Remo and Chiun entered the museum, where Herr Fastbinder’s collection of mechanical oddities and novelties waited in over-air-conditioned splendor. These were oddities and antiques from around the world, procured at great expense by Fastbinder’s network of dealers. There were gleaming robots that seemed to have little or no useful function. There were all kinds of smaller devices in motion, clanking, humming, beeping and generally accomplishing nothing.

Remo examined a rocking chair linked with a lever to a butter chum. The sign explained: Automatic butter chumers were said to have been used in Appalachian homes as far back as 1892. This is a genuine working model that was used as a prop on the Yee Haw! TV program. Go ahead—give it a try!

“Think any of this could possibly be, you know, dangerous?” Remo asked.

“No.”

“Better safe than sorry, though.”

“I agree,” Chiun said.

It took the Masters of Sinanju less than a minute to reduce it all to scraps and rubble.