Butler Did It! by Sally Pomeroy Page A

Zanzibar.”
    Captain Z laughed. “I have to agree
with Mister Butler, not that there aren’t a few customs inspectors
that I wouldn’t mind zapping.”
    “Okay, okay,” Tommy amiably agreed.
“That one was gonna be tricky anyway, but I do have a couple of
ready to go non-lethal devices that will mesh beautifully with your
present security systems.”
    “Such as,” Trask demanded.
    “The first is a mono-directional loud
speaker system. It can project focused high decibel sound waves
anywhere within a two-hundred foot line of sight. The sound waves
are so powerful that not only do they hurt the ears, they cause
involuntary bladder contractions.”
    “Involuntary what,” Richard
asked?
    “Involuntary bladder contractions,” Doc
explained. “The sound waves make you piss your pants.”
    “Okay,” Trask hedged, “so far we got no
death-rays! We can see perps in the dark, and make them piss on
command. What else you got?”
    “Well, my personal favorite is
non-lethal air cannon with a variable muzzle velocity adjustment
that can propel a weighted bean-bag up to two hundred feet at
speeds up to sixty miles per hour.”
    “Jesus, Tommy, you call that
non-lethal!” Doc bellowed. “Anyone hit with a bean-bag moving at
sixty would be a dead man.”
    “No, no. You don’t understand. That’s
always been the problem with non-lethal technology. At close range,
even a rubber bullet is lethal, and at long range, it just bounces
off. That’s the beauty of my device. I’ve fitted it with a laser
sighting system that determines the distance and automatically
adjusts the air pressure so that the velocity of the projectile
always strikes with less than lethal force depending upon the
proximity of the target.”
    “That’s not a bad idea, either.”
Captain Z admitted. “A cannon on the bridge with a two hundred foot
range could cover most of the main deck easily.”
    “And, the best part has been left for
last. All three items, the camera, the loud speaker and the air
cannon can all be run from the bridge of the Pelican from a
laptop.” Tommy said.
    “What do you need to get all three set
up?” Trask asked, finally convinced.
    “Just a couple of hours to mount them,
and another couple of hours to train your people to use them,”
Tommy answered, “and Matthew’s approval, of course.”
    Everyone in the room turned to Butler.
Butler looked hard at Tommy for a few seconds and then turned to
Captain Z and laughed. “It’s okay with me, if it’s okay with
you.”
    “These are all good ideas, well, except
for the one about the electrified rails. If you don’t mind, let’s
also assign a couple of guards to the bridge, just to be sure.” The
Captain added.
     
    <<>>
     
    Katherine was up before dawn the next
day. Someone had thoughtfully left a pair of baggy cotton cargo
pants and a small t-shirt outside her door. The pants were a bit
big for her but she had solved the problem by tying a shoelace
between two belt loops and pulling them together to tighten the
waist. It was an old trick from when she was a teenager, when super
huge pants had been the fashion. The t-shirt however, was on the
tight side, a perfect fit for the current fashion. Overall, she
didn’t think she looked too bad.
    The sun had just begun to highlight the
surfaces of the Pelican when Katherine found her way to the railing
overlooking the main deck. Early morning light is a valuable
commodity in photography and Katherine was used to rising before
dawn. She had come to treasure the freshness of the air and the
peaceful few hours she could steal before the rest of humanity
began their day. For this reason, she was surprised to find what
appeared to be most of the crew of the Pelican, on deck and
involved in a noisy martial arts exercise. It was easy to pick out
Chan in his shorts and another loud Hawaiian shirt, moving from
group to group. At each group, he would stop and demonstrate a move
for that particular group to work on. He seemed