Commando Bats (3 page)

I stuck my oar in. “Fanny doesn’t get you, the good old boys
will.”

Bettina said, “So tomorrow you call a shark. A female
shark.”

Cecile looked up into space. I could practically see her
rapidly re-evaluating all the lawyers in her world of law and politics. Sure
enough, her lips thinned. “There is one he really, really hates — a
liberal feminist —”

“That’s the first one you call.”

Cecile dipped her chin in that ladylike nod again, then she
said without the cultured drawl, “Back in 1973, a Sociology degree was what we
all did in our sorority. Then we married right after graduation, and my parents
bought us our first house, out in Sierra Madre. Entertaining was so important
back then, when he was a junior partner . . . well, in any case,
I have spent my entire life fighting getting old. We adopted so I wouldn’t ruin
my figure, I had my first facelift at forty-two. Is that wise?” Her voice was
really bitter on that last word as she stared down into her cooling coffee.
“After he did that, I couldn’t think. Just left our place and started walking.”

Walking to the pier? I had a feeling ‘our place’ was a four
thousand square foot condo on Ocean Front.

“Then that woman did what she did, and I went home, and . . . what I did
wasn’t
wise. But it felt
great.”

What she did? Uh oh, I thought. Here it comes.

I slipped my tablet out of my bag and put it in my lap.
Experimentally, I focused, and there was its schematic.

Cecile stopped stirring the coffee, tapped the spoon with
delicacy on the side of the cup, and said in a stronger voice, “He was gone, so
I went into our bedroom and yanked open the doors to his closet. I guess I
wanted to see if he had any of her things, though he is the adulterer. The
doors ripped off the hinges. I threw one of them at the floor to ceiling mirror
in his bathroom . . . and, well . . .” She took a
deep, shuddering breath. “It just felt so good when it broke into a million
pieces. So I smashed everything of his, and threw all his furniture over the
balcony onto our private beach. His furniture, his precious suits from London,
everything.”

(I knew it, Ocean Front Walk, I grumped to myself.)

On the tablet, my search turned up a row of entries on
Hephaestus.

Cecile went on. “I was starting on his study when you
called. He should be getting home soon. I’m afraid he’ll have me arrested, or
committed. Or if that Hera woman is real, she’ll come around and turn me into a
tree, or whatever they do.” She put her hands over her face. “Maybe all this is
hallucination and I have a brain tumor.”

Swell, Hephaestus was crippled. Joke’s on me, Hera!

I looked up, finding Cecile staring at me. “Tell the hubs it
was a break-in,” I said, trying to sound friendly and helpful. “Gang hoodlums.”

I could see them both contemplating the likelihood of a
bunch of hulking young guys in tats and hoodies driving unnoticed up Ocean
Front, which has enough private security to run the secret police of a small
country, just to break in and trash an old guy’s New England wing chairs and
Gieves & Hawkes suits.

“Or not,” I said.

Bettina shrugged. “He probably won’t believe that you could
do it. But if that Hera was serious, you’re right, we’ve got a bigger problem.
How do you think we look to Them so far?”

I could hear the capital T, and after all, if we could be
given superpowers, we could be watched by all the gods.

It was then that I got to Hephaestus’s attributes.
Blacksmith . . . metal worker . . . Inventor, Holy Crom! Metal automatons?
Hephaestus had robots as his minions!

Cecile’s expression had reverted to the remote hauteur we
first saw. That’s how she looks when she’s scared. “I want to give it back,”
she whispered.

“Doesn’t look like that’s an option.” Bettina set her coffee
cup down. “So here we are. Either we go our separate ways, in which case, good
luck. Or we deal with this together. She did put us together.”

Cecile said, “She picked out three people our age who
happened to be standing at the end of the pier.”

“Cosmic joke,” I said.

They both ignored me. Bettina said to Cecile, “You don’t
think she couldn’t have separated us out if she wanted to?”

I couldn’t get my mind off those robots. I felt the art
itch, for the first time since the stroke that poleaxed me while standing in
line at the post office. “Going home,” I said, beginning the exasperating
struggle to shift myself from bench to walker to scooter. “Experiment.” To
Bettina, “You want me to fix your house, call. Morning.” In addition to
everything else, I was talked out.

I put down my share of the bill, and exited.

On my way home, I touched every pole, wall, fence, and other
kind of structure that might have electricity. I discovered that I had to have
some kind of metal under my fingers to get a schematic, but it didn’t have to
be much. A few electrons through my fingers could find their way in picoseconds
past shielding — the world is filled with EM. And the larger the power
source, the better schematics I could command.

Living on social security means being very careful with
money. I stopped at a 99c store to pick up some cheap toys to experiment with,
ones that contained at least a bit of conducting metal.

When I reached the gate at home, the motion detectors put on
the lights. As I rolled into the yard, which was warm and still and full of the
scent of jasmine, Twila Dewey’s voice startled me.

“Nancy, what you doing out so late? Got a fella at last?”

“Hobby shop. Supplies,” I called, holding up my bag of toys.

“Good for you! You just keep at it, you’ll be drawing
unicorns again in no time!”

Unicorns? I’d never been in Twila’s place, nor she in mine.
How did she know what I drew? I shook my head as I rolled in and shut my door
firmly. The NSA could save a bundle on cyberspy equipment just by hiring her.

Since I couldn’t build robots, I’d hoped that toys would
suffice, and I was right. Toys could be my minions, interfaces between my hand
and other sources of electricity, as long as I was careful not to break or burn
out the flimsy toys with too much juice.

I crash-landed into bed.

It felt like I’d just fallen asleep when my phone went off
beside my ear. It was Bettina, who said she’d taken a personal day from school,
and wanted to know if I was good for my promise — if so, she’d be right over to
pick me up, as the city hadn’t been able to restore power to their block.

She lived a couple miles inland in West L.A., on a pleasant
block full of jacaranda trees, currently in brilliant lavender bloom.

There on the front lawn was a sturdy California oak, a
shocking hole in one side, like a bite from some kind of energy dragon.

“My nephew works for a contractor,” she said when she took
me into her living room, which like mine, had wall to ceiling bookcases. Scorch
marks scored the ceiling, and there was a hole in the wall between living room
and kitchen, a perfect circle about the size of a baseball, with burn marks
around the edge. “The damage to the house, I can get fixed. I hope the tree
survives.”

She took me through to a typical back yard except for some
bricks piled up beside the cement-block wall. These were covered with various
types of laser burns. A bunch of red fragments lay scattered, obvious remnants
of explosions.

Bettina said, “I’m getting there.”

I’d told her a little about my robot minions on the drive
over, and she’d admitted she was also experimenting. She held up one hand,
fingers poised as if she held something invisible against the length of her
forefinger. “Harry Potter was my model,” she admitted.

“Wand!” I exclaimed.

“A knitting needle. At first I actually used one of my metal
number 4s, but it got hot. Now I know the feel of it in my hand, so I see it
there, and aim.”

She pointed her hand as if she held a wand. A thin beam
sizzled across the yard, and punched into a brick.

“That’s got to be fun,” I exclaimed and for the first time,
she smiled a little.

Then she indicated the back wall. “Here’s the fuse box.”

I carefully placed my hand on the metal plate, and shut my
eyes. There was my schematic of the house, the underground cables, and then the
local power grid.

This was my first really big challenge. The schematic took
over my entire brain. For a time it felt like I’d fallen into it, and I
couldn’t find my way out. But when I made the mental shift to seeing myself
inside, rather than outside — racing along with the
electrons — well,
the nearest comparison I can think of it playing a 3-D video game, only I was
driving with my brain instead of my fingers on a joystick.

I stayed there refusing burned lines and straightening
snarls until the whole was clean and crisp again, humming like a hive of a
million contented bees.

I flexed, and felt the entire block light up.

Getting back to myself was tougher, a little like pulling
out of a wallow of sucking mud. But I made the shift . . . and
found Bettina hovering anxiously over me, as a faint “Finally!” reached us from
one of the neighboring houses.

Bettina smiled with relief. “I was debating whether I ought
to call 911.” And at my no-doubt puzzled look, “You have been sitting there for
almost three hours. I held off only because I could see your eyes moving.”

“Tired,” I admitted.

“I’ll get you right home.” With a thoughtful look, as she
began to pace beside me, she said, “What did you take away from our discussion
last night?”

“Robot minions. You?”

“Until about five minutes ago, I thought someone was setting
us up to fail.”

“Because we’re old?” I asked.

“Maybe. It was more that of the three of us, two were given
powers of destruction, and yours was in question until now. Then there was whom
she picked.”

“Cripple?” I held up my left hand.

Bettina’s eyelids flickered, which made me wonder if I’d
come close, but she said, “Cecile Schuyler has bigger problems on her mind than
trying to be Hercules. And I put in a sixty-hour work week during the school
year, so even if we wanted to, who’s got the time to run around the city
playing superhero, if that’s what Hera wants?”

“Athena said to be different.”

Bettina opened the gate. “Different,” she repeated. “I don’t
know what to expect, outside of my hope of waking up to discover it was a bad
dream.” She reached up to touch a low branch of the oak with the laser hole
burned into it. “Are Titans going to come stomping through Los Angeles, and we
are to battle them?”

“Can’t fight cyclops and minotaurs with electricity,” I
said — my lips getting a real workout on
cyclops
and
minotaurs
.

She gave me a wintry smile. “I would rather cruise around
blowing up crack houses and everything else that spreads so much misery, if
that’s what we’re to be doing. Righting wrongs, I can do that. I’d like to do
that. But how do I find them? Advertise on Craigslist?”

“Athena hid us, on the pier,” I said.

“Yes. The urge to keep this strictly to myself is so strong
that I lied to my daughter last night. She was going to take me to some new
play one of her friends is staging, and I begged off, because I don’t want her
to see the house. I have never lied to my daughter before, ever. I lied to
school this morning, claiming a dental procedure.”

We got into her car. “Sorry about all this driving,” I said.

“You cleaned up my mess, and incidentally rescued a block or
two of very unhappy people. Since I do have a day, before I go back to learning
to control my lightning bolts, I’ll go to the pier, my favorite place when I
want to clear my head. That’s why I was there the other day.”

“Kids these days?” I asked.

“Not the kids. I like the kids, though there are some troubled
ones. It’s the Administrivia — people who have never taught a day in their
lives, who can’t spell, don’t know basic grammar. The closer I get to
retirement, the less patience I have — and the faster they want to push me out.”

She shut up then, and drove in silence until she let me off.
When I reached the yard, there was old Twila again, calling from her shady
balcony, “Nancy! You’ve quite a social life these past couple of days, eh? Is
it a fella? It’s never too late!”

I waved, and shut the door on her cackles.

Shorted sleep and my morning’s exertions had done me in. I
napped for the rest of the day, then played around some more with my robots,
experimenting with driving them by their schematics until metal touched metal.
Then I could flash to the new schematic.

In this way I reached the front house’s wiring system, and
then, through that, the local power grid. I sussed out some incipient problems
in our aging Los Angeles infrastructure, then, sensing another world overlying
mine — the world of computers, internet, surveillance — pulled back.
I had no idea if I had an electronic footprint, or what to do about it if I
did.

It was late, so back to bed.

Next morning, being Saturday, was my day for the laundry
room at the house. I pushed my stuff into the yard, half-expecting Twila to be
peeking out to inspect my dirty clothes, but she wasn’t there. Though I liked
her — and loved her stories about World War II era Los Angeles — I
didn’t relish the thought of the neighbors hearing about the elderly state of
my underthings.

And that gave me an idea.

My wash chugging away, when I got back to my place, I
dithered about whether or not I should call the other two. Smart or stupid? I
was still dithering when my phone rang. To my surprise, it was Cecile.

She wanted to meet, suggesting a very trendy but expensive
cafe not too far away in distance, but a thousand miles from the reach of my
budget. However, she ended with, “My treat,” leaving me nothing to say but,
“See you at noon.”