Unpopular Science

“Yes! Yes! You are exactly right!”

“Uh-huh.” Remo’s mind chewed on this, looking for a nugget of logical filling. If he were thinking straight, would this sound just as stupid? “So you’re like the evil genius, right?”

“Yes, precisely!” He was so worked up that Cote actually started coming toward Remo as if to shake his hand.

Then Cote stopped, stiffened and pulled down on the vest of his three-piece suit. “And now, Mr. Annoyed, I think it is time I give you the welcome you deserve.”

Cote’s hand was resting on a big purple chunk of crystal that was pulsing from a hidden light When he depressed it, the quartz began to glow steadily and the knob recessed into the control panel.

The red-velvet panels around the room shifted, making unnecessarily loud servomotor sounds, then each door began to lift, each on a pair of heavy pneumatic cylinders.

Remo realized he was still standing there and he didn’t think he could move another step. There was a black cloud seeping around the edges of his vision…

Whatever it was behind the doors, which were taking forever to open, how would he be able to run from them, let alone defend himself?

“Hey, Blofeld, laying it on a little thick, aren’t you?”

“Au revoir, Mr. Annoyed. Or perhaps I should say goodbye.”

Remo Williams looked around, found he couldn’t take it all in at once, and concentrated on a single hidden chamber as the doors halted in a fully raised position. He still didn’t think he was seeing it correctly. Was he hallucinating?

It was a man in a wheelchair. The man was silver, grinning easily with a massive chrome grin. Its head rotated ninety degrees left, then right, before turning to face Remo Williams. Red lights came on in its eye sockets.

“Allow me to introduce my dear friend,” Cote said grandly.

“Mecha-Stephen Hawking?” Remo asked.

“I am Mr. U.,” said the thing in the wheelchair.

“Mr. Who?” Remo asked, trying to make his feet function, trying to make his vision clear, trying to think.

He looked at the next open space in the wall. Inside was…a rocking horse. He squeezed his eyes, forcing his tunnel of vision to focus itself, and then saw it was a mechanical jumble with legs bolted to a small tank tread on either side. It still resembled a rocking horse. Its surface was composed of dull gray metal shingles and its doglike head ended in a nose with a gun barrel jutting out of it. In the next cubicle was a steel rack mounted with four wheeled devices, like aluminum bread boxes with many long needles sticking out of their skin.

There must be fifteen or twenty open doors, and if Remo could trust his vision, each one of them contained its own unique glowing, blinking contraption.

“Now, Mr. Annoyed, you die,” said Cote with well-rehearsed understated flair.

“Mr. U. die or you die?” Remo demanded.

“You die, I said,” Cote retorted.

“You?”

“Not me, you!”

“Him?” Remo pointed at the wheelchair droid with the red eyes.

“Shut up!”

Remo couldn’t help but smirk. “Sorry if I’m not playing the right part in your little scene.”

“You will act out the most important part of the scene, have no fear,” Cote said and, almost casually, he depressed the next pulsing crystal, the pink one.

There was a whirring of multiple small motors and Remo saw a connection on a mechanical arm separate from the back of the chrome-toothed Mr. U. The same connection was severed from every cubicle as all the devices were freed of their umbilicals, and at that moment Remo felt the debilitating sensation—stop.

It didn’t fade, it didn’t decrease, it just stopped. Whatever had caused it had been turned off when all the devices were released from their umbilicals. Remo watched his tunnel of vision expand, felt the current of life surge into his limbs.

Mr. U, came at him wearing a wicked smile, and Remo moved out of its path. Now he saw it more clearly and found it was a sort of battering ram on wheels, a sculpted chrome demon head perched-atop a mass of steel arms and claws. The shivering floor attested to its great weight.

Regardless of Mr. U.’s huge mass, it moved fast on its wheelchair, and when Remo moved, Mr. U. altered course to intercept him. Remo moved faster, pushing his wobbly legs, trying to force them to recover faster. Cote and his butler were just standing there, so who had the joystick?

Mr. U. stopped where it was and turned in a circle, rotating, and raised its palm. An inch-wide barrel opening appeared, and Remo braced himself.

Mr. U. fired its weapon and a tiny rocket screamed in Remo’s direction on a tail of blue fire. It wasn’t even a bullet. It was slow. He could dodge this thing. A rocket was just bullet, and a bullet was just a rock, and anybody could dodge a rock.

Remo moved fast on legs of rubber, judged the approach of the missile, judged his own speed and knew he wasn’t going to make it. He pushed harder and lurched into a violent, ungraceful twist.