The whatsit was extruding more aerials. Little lights ran around its square body. A buzzing sound came from within. The burglar said, “It isn’t gonna explode, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” the drunk said. “It looks like it’s broadcasting. Suppose I invented something to look for intelligence on other planets?”
“Would you want something like that?”
The drunk considered, then shook his head. “No. You’re right, it isn’t that.” Perking up, he said, “But you got the idea, right? Try me, come on, tell me stuff. We gotta get moving here. I gotta figure out what this thing’s supposed to do before it starts doing it all on its own. Come on, come on.”
The burglar thought. He wasn’t actually Santa Claus, of course, but he was certainly familiar with stuff. “A fax machine,” he said, there being three of them at the moment in his sack on the floor beside the rhomboid.
“Did one,” the drunk said. “Recycles newspapers, prints on it.”
“Coffee maker.”
“Part of my breakfast maker.”
“Rock polisher.”
“Don’t want one.”
“Air purifier.”
“I manufacture my own air in here.”
They went on like that, the burglar pausing to think of more things, trying them out, bouncing them off the drunk, but none of them right, while the whatsit entertained itself with its chirruping and buzzing in the middle of the room, until at last the burglar’s mind had become drained of artifacts, of ideas, of things, of stuff. “I’m sorry, pal,” the burglar said, after their final silence. Shaking his head, he got up from the rhomboid, picked up his sack, and said, “I’d like to help. But I gotta get on with my life, you know?”
“I appreciate all you done,” the drunk said, trying but failing to stand. Then, getting mad all over again, he clenched his fists and shouted, “If only they didn’t steal my computer!” He pointed an angry fist toward a keypad beside the front door. “You see that pad? That’s the building’s so-called burglar alarm! Ha! Burglars laugh at it!”
They did. Jack himself had laughed at several of them just tonight. “Hard to find a really good burglar al—” he said, and stopped.
They both stared at the whatsit, still buzzing away at itself like a drum machine with the mute on. “By golly,” breathed the drunk, “you got it.”
The burglar frowned. “It’s a burglar alarm? That thing?”
“It’s the perfect burglar alarm,” the drunk said, and bounced around with new confidence on his trapezoid. “You know what’s wrong with regular burglar alarms?” he demanded.
“They aren’t very good,” the burglar said.
“They trap the innocent,” the drunk told him, “and they’re too stupid to catch the guilty.”
“That’s pretty much true,” the burglar agreed.
“A perfect burglar alarm would sense burglars, know them by a thousand tiny indications, too subtle for you and me, and call the cops before they could pull the job!”
Behind his big white Santa Claus beard, Jack the burglar’s chin felt itchy all of a sudden. The big round fake stomach beneath his red costume was heavier than before. Giving the whatsit a sickly smile, he said, “A machine that can sense burglars? Impossible.”
“No, sir,” said the drunk. “Heavier-than-air flight is impossible. Sensing guilt is a snap, for the right machine.” Contemplating his invention, frowning in thought, the drunk said, “But it was broadcasting. Practicing, do you suppose? Telling me it’s ready to go to work?”
“Me, too,” the burglar said, moving toward the door.
“Go to work. Nice to—”
The doorbell rang. “Huh,” the drunk said. “Who do you suppose that is at this hour?”
Skeeks
The jangle of the telephone eventually dragged the miserable Boy Cartwright up to the surface of the planet earth from his drug-induced sleep — the only kind of sleep he ever got — to find himself in his own rumpled bed in his own unspeakable room, with Florida sunlight like radiation poisoning at the edges of the thick, dark window shades. To one side of him sprawled in wanton stupor a reporter named Trixie, or so she claimed, while on the other side stood a half-empty — nothing in Boy’s life was half-full — bottle of flat champagne and the squawking telephone. The phone could wait. First, Boy finished the champagne.
This must be a Saturday or a Sunday. Otherwise, he would have awakened at work with the sudden twitch-jump that told his co-workers at the world’s most successful (and therefore most reprehensible) supermarket tabloid that the decayed Boy Cartwright brain had yet again chosen to rejoin the decaying Boy Cartwright body. So if this was a weekend, and if the telephone would not stop that noise, the Weekly Galaxy itself must be calling with news of the world. A task. Another opportunity for Boy Cartwright, maggot-infested Englishman, to prove himself the star on the Galaxy staff.
Champagne ingested, Boy at last picked up the phone: “Are you there?”
“Are you awake?”
“Ah, Mr. Scarpnafe,” Boy said. “Delightful to hear your voice.”
“Skeeks is dead,” Scarpnafe announced. He had, in fact, a voice like a ferret with a hernia.
“Ah,” said Boy, knowing that sooner or later someone would tell him what that sentence meant.
“In Los Angeles.”
That was no help. “Ah,” Boy said.
“We’ll want the whole thing. Get there before the cremation.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And we’ll definitely want the body in the box.”
“Consider the matter done,” Boy said and reached out to tug at Trixie’s nether hair. “I’m assembling my team already.”
“Good Boy,” Scarpnafe said, and hung up the phone.
Trixie grumbled. She said, “Are you ever going to do anything pleasant with that hand?”
“Of course. Who is Skeeks?”
“A dog. A German shepherd. With a great big tongue, like yours.”
The Galaxy stringer who met Boy and his team of four reporters at LAX was a personal trainer named Jim Jemmy, who would have been much more successful at his chosen career were it not for his insuppressible body odor, a personal tragedy that forced him to supplement his income with other less savory tasks, such as working for the Galaxy. “I got us a house in Venice,” he announced as Boy and the team approached him and then stepped back. “Less than two miles from Skeeks’ place in Santa Monica.”
“Wonderful,” said Boy. “Lead on.”
On the plane coming out, Boy had been brought up to speed on the late Skeeks, who had been, it seemed, a lovable German shepherd, as if there could be such a thing. For three years Skeeks had portrayed the adorable pooch on an extremely successful sitcom, and when the human male lead of that show decided to throw it all in for the glories of failure as a motion picture star, the mail bemoaning the disappearance of Skeeks from the nation’s screens (they’re that stupid, and yet they can read and write, marveled Boy) was so overwhelming (the word avalanche was used in all press releases on the subject) that the network brought Skeeks back the next season with his very own sitcom, called Skeeks, in which he portrayed the dog in a man-and-dog vaudeville act. The idea at the heart of this series — that there is, at this moment, in the secondary cities of America, a thriving circuit of vaudeville theaters — was not the most outlandish suggestion ever made on television, and it was accepted without a murmur, as was Skeeks’ partner on Skeeks, a comedian named Bill Terry, who when sober could juggle, sing, ride a unicycle and remember jokes.