The Exploding Detective Read Online Free PDF Page B

that I was spinning back towards the industrial
district. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like any of this. I had been hoping that
I could just lay low in a nice garbage can somewhere until this whole thing
blew over, then show up for work tomorrow morning and play dumb about the whole
thing. What robbery? What cowardice? Where’s my check? That sort of thing.
    Once I managed to
straighten myself out in the sky, I looked down and saw that I was right over
the scene of the robbery, which was still in progress. And I saw that the
creatures down there had seen me. That didn’t alarm me too much. There was no
way I was going to go down to where they were. They could stand there until
they were fifty and we still wouldn’t be any closer to each other. Then I saw
about twenty of the newer shinier looking creatures suddenly roar up into the
sky, jet exhaust coming out of their rear ends. Obviously something new had
been added. Something I didn’t like one bit.
    I frantically
tried to turn in about five directions at once, and somehow managed to throw
something out of whack on my jet pack. Suddenly I didn’t have any control over
the machine at all. I began making high speed figure eights in the sky, along
with barrel rolls, wing-overs, reverse Cuban eights, corkscrew rolls, outside
loops, stall turns, and flat spins. You name a way of being out of control in
an aircraft and I performed that maneuver. At one point I was actually hopping
across the sky like a grasshopper. I looked like the greatest trick flyer in
the world.
    The creatures
tried to stay with me, doing their best to match me harebrained stunt for
harebrained stunt, all the while firing some kind of laser beams at me from
their eyes. But their obviously superior equipment and flying skills were no
match for my accidental acrobatics.
    One by one my
pursuers came to grief. They would be corkscrewing right behind me as I went
between two buildings, and when I came out, after performing four high speed
right turns and an Immelman, I was alone. Every time one of them got on my
tail, I would end up miraculously surviving and he would end up with his
picture on the wall of some bar in the high desert.
    Within ten minutes,
I was alone in the sky, clinging to the ledge of the Central City Bank
Building, my jet pack roaring, with no way to get down. All of my directional
controls were gone now. It’s like the whole machine was stuck in neutral.
    I clung to the
ledge, calmly running through a mental checklist of all of the things I… then
lost my grip mid-list and plummeted to the ground, my jet pack still going full
blast. I hit the street and exploded, taking out one of the robbers’ getaway
trucks and scattering unconscious creatures in all directions.
    I was hurt, but
not as hurt as I would have been if I wasn’t used to it. As I slowly got to my
feet, people rushed up to congratulate me. Never had any of them seen flying
like that before. And, though I hadn’t foiled the entire robbery, I had at
least stopped one of the trucks. And I had killed or captured twenty nine of
the creatures. I was the hero of the day.
    I went
triumphantly along to the police station with my captured robbers, giving them
a little push when I felt they weren’t moving fast enough, and accepting
congratulations from all sides for the great job I did, and for being such a
helluva guy.
    The police had
problems booking my captives because, for one thing, they didn’t have any
fingerprints. And their faces were all the same. How do you book guys like
that? How do you arrange them in a line-up? Modern police methods require
different faces. The police thought everybody knew that. These robbers made
them mad.
    The creatures
didn’t have hearts or other internal organs either. What they did have was a
variety of propulsion mechanisms – electric motors, clockwork, steam power,
storage batteries and so on. They were also equipped with built-in radio
control receivers and rudimentary mechanical