Martin, George R.R. - Wildcards 01 - Wild Cards

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WildcardsWildcards
Book 1 of Wildcards
Edited by George R.R. Martin
ISBN: 0-553-26190-8
PROLOGUE
From Wild Times: An Oral History of the Postwar Years, by Studs Terkel
(Pantheon, 1979).
Herbert L. Cranston
Years later, when I saw Michael Rennie come out of that flying saucer in The Day
the Earth Stood Still, I leaned over to the wife and said, "Now that's the way
an alien emissary ought to look." I've always suspected that it was Tachyons
arrival that gave them the idea for that picture, but you know how Hollywood
changes things around. I was there, so I know how it really was. For starts, he
came down in White Sands, not in Washington. He didn't have a robot, and we
didn't shoot him. Considering what happened, maybe we should have, eh?
His ship, well, it certainly wasn't a flying saucer, and it didn't look a damn
thing like our captured V-2s or even the moon rockets on Werner's drawing
boards. It violated every known law of aerodynamics and Einstein's special
relativity too.
He came down at night, his ship all covered with lights, the prettiest thing I
ever saw. It set down plunk in the middle of the proving range, without rockets,
propellers, rotors, or any visible means of propulsion whatsoever. The outer
skin looked like it was coral or some kind of porous rock, covered with whorls
and spurs, like something you'd find in a limestone cavern or spot while
deep-sea diving.
I was in the first jeep to reach it. By the time we got there, Tach was already
outside. Michael Rennie, now, he looked right in that silvery-blue spacesuit of
his, but
Tachyon looked like a cross between one of the Three Musketeers and some kind of
circus performer. I don't mind telling you, all of us were pretty scared driving
out, the rocketry boys and eggheads just as much as the GIs. I remembered that
Mercury Theater broadcast back in '39, when Orson Welles fooled everybody into
thinking that the Martians were invading New Jersey, and I couldn't help
thinking maybe this time it was happening for real. But once the spotlights hit
him, standing there in front of his ship, we all relaxed. He just wasn't scary.
He was short, maybe five three, five four, and to tell the truth, he looked more
scared than us. He was wearing these green tights with the boots built right
into them, and this orangy shirt with lace sissy ruffles at the wrists and
collar, and some kind of silvery brocade vest, real tight. His coat was a
lemon-yellow number, with a green cloak snapping around in the wind behind him
and catching about his ankles. On top of his head he had this wide-brimmed hat,
with a long red feather sticking out of it, except when I got closer, I saw it
was really some weird spiky quill. His hair covered his shoulders; at first
glance, I thought he was a girl. It was a peculiar sort of hair too, red and
shiny, like thin copper wire.
I didn't know what to make of him, but I remember one of our Germans saying that
he looked like a Frenchman.
No sooner had we arrived than he came slogging right over to the jeep, bold as
you please, trudging through the sand with a big bag stuck up under one arm.
He started telling us his name, and he was still telling it to us while four
other jeeps pulled up. He spoke better English than most of our Germans, despite
having this weird accent, but it was hard to be sure at first when he spent ten
minutes telling us his name.
I was the first human being to speak to him. That's God's truth, I don't care
what anybody else tells you, it was me. I got out of the jeep and stuck out my
hand and said, "Welcome to America." I started to introduce myself, but he
interrupted me before I could get the words out.
"Herb Cranston of Cape May, New Jersey," he said. "A rocket scientist.
Excellent. I am a scientist myself." He didn't look like any scientist I'd ever
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known, but I made allowances, since he came from outer space. I was more
concerned about how he'd known my name. I asked him.
He waved his ruffles in the air, impatient. "I read your mind. That's
unimportant. Time is short, Cranston. Their ship broke up." I thought he look
more than a little sick when he said that; sad, you know, hurting, but scared
too. And tired, very tired. Then he started talking about this globe. That was
the globe with the wild card virus, of course, everyone knows that now, but back
then I didn't know what the hell he was going on about. It was lost, he said, he
needed to get it back, and he hoped for all our sakes it was still intact. He
wanted to talk to our top leaders. He must have read their names in my mind,
because he named Werner, and Einstein, and the President, except he called him
"this President Harry S Truman of yours." Then he climbed right into the back of
the jeep and sat down. "Take me to them," he said. "At once. "
Professor Lyle Crawford Kent
In a certain sense, it was I who coined his name. His real name, of course, his
alien patronymic, was impossibly long. Several of us tried to shorten it, I
recall, using this or that piece of it during our conferences, but evidently
this was some sort of breach of etiquette on his home world, Takis. He
continually corrected us, rather arrogantly I might say, like an elderly pedant
lecturing a pack of schoolboys. Well, we needed to call him something. The title
came first. We might have called him "Your Majesty" or some such, since he
claimed to be a prince, but Americans are not comfortable with that sort of
bowing and scraping. He also said he was a physician, although not in our sense
of the word, and it must be admitted that he did seem to know a good deal of
genetics and biochemistry, which seemed to be his area of expertise. Most of our
team held advanced degrees, and we addressed each other accordingly, and so it
was only natural that we fell to calling him "Doctor" as well.
The rocket scientists were obsessed with our visitor's ship, particularly with
the theory of his faster-than-light propulsion system. Unfortunately, our
Takisian friend bad burned out his ship's interstellar drive in his haste to
arrive here before those relatives of his, and in any case he adamantly refused
to let any of us, civilian or military, inspect the inside of his craft. Werner
and his Germans were reduced to questioning the alien about the drive, rather
compulsively I thought. As I understood it, theoretical physics and the
technology of space travel were not disciplines in which our visitor was
especially expert, so the answers he gave them were not very clear, but we did
grasp that the drive made use of a hithertounknown particle that traveled faster
than light.
The alien had a term for the particle, as unpronounceable as his name. Well, I
had a certain grounding in classical Greek, like all educated men, and a flair
for nomenclature if I do say so myself. I was the one who devised the coinage
"tachyon." Somehow the GIs got things confused, and began referring to our
visitor as "that tachyon fellow." The phrase caught on, and from there it was
only a short step to Doctor Tachyon, the name by which he became generally known
in the press.
Colonel Edward Reid, U.S. Army Intelligence (Ret.)
You want me to say it, right? Every damned reporter I've ever talked to wants me
to say it. All right, here it is. We made a mistake. And we paid for it too. Do
you know that afterwards they came within a hair of court-martialing all of us,
the whole interrogation team? That's a fact. The hell of it is, I don't know how
we could have been expected to do things any differently than we did. I was in
charge of his interrogation. I ought to know. What did we really know about him?
Nothing except what he told us himself. The eggheads were treating him like Baby
Jesus, but military men have to be a little more cautious. If you want to
understand, you have to put yourself in our shoes and remember how it was back
then.
His story was utterly preposterous, and he couldn't prove a single damned thing.
Okay, he landed in this funny-looking rocket plane, except it didn't have
rockets. That was impressive. Maybe that plane of his did come from outer space,
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like he said.
But maybe it didn't. Maybe it was one of those secret projects the Nazis had
been working on, left over from the war. They'd had jets at the end, you know,
and those V-2s, and they were even working on the atomic bomb. Maybe it was
Russian. I don't know. If Tachyon had only let us examine his ship, our boys
would have been able to figure out where it came from, I'm sure. But he wouldn't
let anyone inside the damned thing, which struck me as more than a little
suspicious. What was he trying to hide?
He said he came from the planet Talds. Well, I never heard of no goddamned
planet Takis. Mars, Venus, Jupiter, sure. Even Mongo and Barsoom. But Takis? I
called up a dozen top astronomers all around the country, even one guy over in
England. Where's the planet Takis? I asked them. There is no planet Takis, they
told me.
He was supposed to be an alien, right? We examined him. A complete physical, X
rays, a battery of psychological tests, the works. He tested human. Every which
way we turned him, he came up human. No extra organs, no green blood, five
fingers, five toes, two balls, and one cock. The fucker was no different from
you and me. He spoke English, for crissakes. But get this-he also spoke German.
And Russian and French and a few other languages I've forgotten. I made wire
recordings of a couple of my sessions with him, and played them for a linguist,
who said the accent was Central European.
And the headshrinkers, whoa, you should have heard their reports. Classic
paranoid, they said. Megalomania, they said. Schitzo, they said. All kinds of
stuff. I mean, look, this guy claimed to be a prince from outer space with magic
fucking powers who'd come here all alone to save our whole damned planet. Does
that sound sane to you?
And let me say something about those damned magic powers of his. I'll admit it,
that was the thing that bothered me the most. I mean, not only could Tachyon
tell you what you were thinking, he could look at you funny and make you jump up
on your desk and drop your pants, whether you wanted to or not. I spent hours
with him every day, and he convinced me. The thing was, my reports didn't
convince the brass back east. Some kind of trick, they thought, he was
hypnotizing us, he was reading our body posture, using psychology to make us
think he read minds. They were going to send out a stage hypnotist to figure out
how he did it, but the shit hit the fan before they got around to it.
He didn't ask much. All he wanted was a meeting with the President so he could
mobilize the entire American military to search for some crashed rocket ship.
Tachyon would be in command, of course, no one else was qualified. Our top
scientists could be his assistants. He wanted radar and jets and submarines and
bloodhounds and weird machines nobody had ever heard of. You name it, he wanted
it. And he did not want to have to consult with anybody, either. This guy
dressed like a fag hairdresser, if you want the truth, but the way he gave
orders you would've thought he had three stars at least.
And why? Oh, yeah, his story, that sure was great. On this planet Takis, he
said, a couple dozen big families ran the whole show, like royalty, except they
all had magic powers, and they lorded it over everybody else who didn't have
magic powers. These families spent most of their time feuding like the Hatfields
and McCoys. His particular bunch had a secret weapon they'd been working on for
a couple of centuries. A tailored artificial virus designed to interact with the
genetic makeup of the host organism, he said. He'd been part of the research
team.
Well, I was humoring him. What did this germ do? I asked him. Now get this-it
did everything.
What it was supposed to do, according to Tachyon, was goose up these mind powers
of theirs, maybe even give them some new powers, evolve 'em almost into gods,
which would sure as hell give his kin the edge over the others. But it didn't
always do that. Sometimes, yeah. Most often it killed the test subjects. He went
on and on about how deadly this stuf was, and managed to give me the creeps.
What were the symptoms? I asked. We knew about germ weapons back in 46; just in
case he was telling the truth, I wanted us to know what to look for.
He couldn't tell me the symptoms. There were all kinds of symptoms. Everybody
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had different symptoms, every single person. You ever hear of a germ worked like
that? Not me.
Then Tachyon said that sometimes it turned people into freaks instead of killing
them. What kind of freaks? I asked. All kinds, he said. I admitted that it
sounded pretty nasty, and asked him why his folks hadn't used this stuff on the
other families. Because sometimes the virus worked, he said; it remade its
victims, gave them powers. What kinds of powers? All kinds of powers, naturally.
So they had this stuff. They didn't want to use it on their enemies, and maybe
give them powers. They didn't want to use it on themselves, and kill off half
the family.
They weren't about to forget about it. They decided to test it on us. Why us?
Because we were genetically identical to Takisians, he said, the only such race
they knew of, and the bug was designed to work on the Takisian genotype. So why
were we so lucky? Some of his people thought it was parallel evolution, others
believed that Earth was a lost Takisian colony-he didn't know and didn't care.
He did care about the experiment. Thought it was "ignoble." He protested, he
said, but they ignored him. The ship left. And Tachyon decided to stop them all
by himself. He came after them in a smaller ship, burned out his damned tachyon
drive getting here ahead of them. When he intercepted them, they told him to
fuck of, even though he was family, and they had some kind of space battle. His
ship was damaged, theirs was crippled, and they crashed. Somewhere back east, he
said. He lost them, on account of the damage to his ship. So he landed at White
Sands, where he thought he could get help.
I got down the whole story on my wire recorder. Afterwards, Army Intelligence
contacted all sorts of experts: biochemists and doctors and germ-warfare guys,
you name it. An alien virus, we told them, symptoms completely random and
unpredictable. Impossible, they said. Utterly absurd. One of them gave me a
whole lecture about how Earth germs could never affect Martians like in that H.
G. Wells book, and Martian germs couldn't affect us, either. Everybody agreed
that this random-symptom bit was a laugh. So what were we supposed to do? We all
cracked jokes about the Martian flu and spaceman's fever. Somebody, I don't know
who, called it the wild card virus in a report, and the rest of us picked up on
the name, but nobody believed it for a second.
It was a bad situation, and Tachyon just made it worse when he tried to escape.
He almost pulled it off, but like my old man always told me, "almost" only
counts in horseshoes and grenades. The Pentagon had sent out their own man to
question him, a bird colonel named Wayne, and Tachyon finally got fed up, I
guess. He took control of Colonel Wayne, and together they just marched out of
the building. Whenever they were challenged, Wayne snapped off the orders to let
them pass, and rank does have its privileges. The cover story was that Wayne had
orders to escort Tachyon back to Washington. They commandeered a jeep and got
all the way back to the spaceship, but by then one of the sentries had checked
with me, and my men were waiting for them, with direct orders to ignore anything
Colonel Wayne might say. We took him back into custody and kept him there, under
heavy guard. For all his magic powers, there wasn't much he could do about it.
He could make one person do what he wanted, maybe three or four if he tried real
hard, but not all of us, and by then we were wise to his tricks.
Maybe it was a bonehead maneuver, but his escape attempt did get him the date
with Einstein he'd been badgering us for. The Pentagon kept telling us he was
the world's geatest hypnotist, but I wasn't buying that anymore, and you should
have heard what Colonel Wayne thought of the theory. The eggheads were getting
agitated too. Anyway, together Wayne and I managed to wrangle authorization to
fly the prisoner to Princeton. I figured a talk with Einstein couldn't do any
harm, and might do some good. His ship was impounded, and we'd gotten all we
were going to get from the man himself. Einstein was supposed to be the world's
greatest brain, maybe he could figure the guy out, right?
There are still those who say that the military is to blame for everything that
happened, but it's just not true. It's easy to be wise in hindsight, but I was
there, and I'll maintain to my dying day that the steps we took were reasonable
and prudent.
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The thing that really burns me is when they talk about how we did nothing to
track down that damned globe with the wild card spores. Maybe we made a mistake,
yeah, but we weren't stupid, we were covering our asses. Every damned military
installation in the country got a directive to be on the lookout for a crashed
spaceship that looked something like a seashell with running lights. Is it my
fucking fault that none of them took it seriously?
Give me credit for one thing, at least. When all hell broke loose, I had Tachyon
jetting back toward New York within two hours. I was in the seat behind him. The
redheaded wimp cried half the fucking way across the country. Me, I prayed for
Jetboy.
THIRTY MINUTES OVER BROADWAY! JETBOY'S LAST ADVENTURE!
by Howard Waldrop
Bonham's Flying Service of Shantak, New Jersey, was socked in. The small
searchlight on the tower barely pushed away the darkness of the swirling fog.
There was the sound of car tires on the wet pavement in front of Hangar 23. A
car door opened, a moment later it closed. Footsteps came to the Employees Only
door. It opened. Scoop Swanson came in, carrying his Kodak Autograph Mark II and
a bag of flashbulbs and film.
Lincoln Traynor raised up from the engine of the surplus P-40 he was overhauling
for an airline pilot who had got it at a voice-bid auction for $293. Judging
from the shape of the engine, it must have been flown by the Flying Tigers in
1940. A ball game was on the workbench radio. Line turned it down. "'Lo, Line,"
said Scoop.
"'Lo."
"No word yet?"
"Don't expect any. The telegram he sent yesterday said he'd be in tonight. Good
enough for me."
Scoop lit a Camel with a Three Torches box match from the workbench. He blew
smoke toward the Absolutely No Smoking sign at the back of the hangar. "Hey,
what's this?" He walked to the rear. Still in their packing cases were two long
red wing extensions and two 300-gallon teardrop underwing tanks. "When these get
here?"
"Air Corps shipped them yesterday from San Francisco. Another telegram came for
him today. You might as well read it, you're doing the story." Line handed him
the War Department orders.
TO: Jetboy (Tomlin, Robert NMI) HOR: Bonham's Flying Service Hangar 23, Shantak,
New Jersey
1. Effective this date 1200Z hours 12 Aug '46, you are no longer on active duty,
United States Army Air Force.
2. Your aircraft (model-experimental) (ser. no. JB-1) is hereby decommissioned
from active status, United States Army Air Force, and reassigned you as private
aircraft. No further materiel support from USAAF or War Department will be
forthcoming.
3. Records, commendations, and awards forwarded under separate cover.
4. Our records show Tomlin, Robert NMI, has not obtained pilot's license. Please
contact CAB for courses and certification.
5. Clear skies and tailwinds,
For Arnold, H. H. CofS, USAAF ref. Executive Order #2, 08 Dec '41
"What's this about him having no pilot's license?" asked the newspaperman. "I
went through the morgue on him-his file's a foot thick. Hell, he must have flown
faster and farther, shot down more planes than anyone-five hundred planes, fifty
ships! He did it without a pilot's license?"
Line wiped grease from his mustache. "Yep. That was the most plane-crazy kid you
ever saw. Back in '39, he couldn't have been more than twelve, he heard there
was a job out here. He showed up at four A.M.-lammed out of the orphanage to do
it. They came out to get him. But of course Professor Silverberg had hired him,
squared it with them."
"Silverberg's the one the Nazis bumped off? The guy who made the jet?"
"Yep. Years ahead of everybody, but weird. I put together the plane for him,
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Bobby and I built it by hand. But Silverberg made the jets--damnedest engines
you ever saw. The Nazis and Italians, and Whittle over in England, had started
theirs. But the Germans found out something was happening here."
"How'd the kid learn to fly?"
"He always knew, I think," said Lincoln. "One day he's in here helping me bend
metal. The next, him and the professor are flying around at four hundred miles
per. In the dark, with those early engines."
"How'd they keep it a secret?"
"They didn't, very well. The spies came for Silverbergwanted him and the plane.
Bobby was out with it. I think he and the prof knew something was up. Silverberg
put up such a fight the Nazis killed him. Then, there was the diplomatic stink.
In those days the JB-1 only had six .30 cals on it-where the professor got them
I don't know. But the kid took care of the car full of spies with it, and that
speedboat on the Hudson full of embassy people. All on diplomatic visas."
"Just a sec," Linc stopped himself. "End of a doubleheader in Cleveland. On the
Blue Network." He turned up the metal Philco radio that sat above the toolrack.
" Sanders to Papenfuss to Volstad, a double play. That does it. So the Sox drop
two to Cleveland. We'll be right-" Linc turned it off. "There goes five bucks,"
he said. "Where was I?"
"The Krauts killed Silverberg, and Jetboy got even. He went to Canada, right?"
"Joined the RCAF, unofficially. Fought in the Battle of Britain, went to China
against the Japs with the Tigers, was back in Britain for Pearl Harbor."
"And Roosevelt commissioned him?"
"Sort of. You know, funny thing about his whole career. He fights the whole war,
longer than any other American-late '39 to '45--then right at the end, he gets
lost in the Pacific, missing. We all think he's dead for a year. Then they find
him on that desert island last month, and now he's coming home." There was a
high, thin whine like a prop plane in a dive. It came from the foggy skies
outside. Scoop put out his third Camel. "How can he land in this soup?"
"He's got an all-weather radar set-got it off a German night fighter back in
'43. He could land that plane in a circus tent at midnight."
They went to the door. Two landing lights pierced the rolling mist. They lowered
to the far end of the runway, turned, and came back on the taxi strip.
The red fuselage glowed in the gray-shrouded lights of the airstrip. The
twin-engine high-wing plane turned toward them and rolled to a stop.
Linc Traynor put a set of double chocks under each of the two rear tricycle
landing gears. Half the glass nose of the plane levered up and pulled back. The
plane had four 20mm cannon snouts in the wing roots between the engines, and a
75mm gunport below and to the left of the cockpit rim.
It had a high thin rudder, and the rear elevators were shaped like the tail of a
brook trout. Under each of the elevators was the muzzle of a rear-firing machine
gun. The only markings on the plane were four nonstandard USAAF stars in a black
roundel, and the serial number JB-1 on the top right and bottom left wings and
beneath the rudder.
The radar antennae on the nose looked like something to roast weenies on.
A boy dressed in red pants, white shirt, and a blue helmet and goggles stepped
out of the cockpit and onto the dropladder on the left side.
He was nineteen, maybe twenty. He took off his helmet and goggles. He had curly
mousy brown hair, hazel eyes, and was short and chunky.
Linc," he said. He hugged the pudgy man to him, patted his back for a full
minute. Scoop snapped off a shot. "Great to have you back, Bobby, said Linc.
"Nobody's called me that in years," he said. "It sounds real good to hear it
again."
"This is Scoop Swanson," said line. "He's gonna make you famous all over again."
"I'd rather be asleep." He shook the reporter's hand. "Any place around here we
can get some ham and eggs?"
The launch pulled up to the dock in the fog. Out in the harbor a ship finished
cleaning its bilges and was turning to steam back southward.
There were three men on the mooring: Fred and Ed and Filmore. One man stepped
out of the launch with a suitcase in his hands. Filmore leaned down and gave the
guy at the wheel of the motorboat a Lincoln and two Jacksons. Then he helped the
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guy with the suitcase.
"Welcome home, Dr. Tod."
"It's good to be back, Filmore." Tod was dressed in a baggy suit, and had on an
overcoat even though it was August. He wore his hat pulled low over his face,
and from it a glint of metal was reflected in the pale lights from a warehouse.
"This is Fred and this is Ed," said Filmore. "They're here just for the night."
"'Lo," said Fred. "'Lo," said Ed.
They walked back to the car, a '46 Merc that looked like a submarine. They
climbed in, Fred and Ed watching the foggy alleys to each side. Then Fred got
behind the wheel, and Ed rode shotgun. With a sawed-off ten-gauge.
"Nobody's expecting me. Nobody cares," said Dr. Tod. "Everybody who had
something against me is either dead or went respectable during the war and made
a mint. I'm an old man and I'm tired. I'm going out in the country and raise
bees and play the horses and the market."
"Not planning anything, boss?"
"Not a thing."
He turned his head as they passed a streetlight. Half his face was gone, a
smooth plate reaching from jaw to hatline, nostril to left ear.
"I can't shoot anymore, for one thing. My depth perception isn't what it used to
be."
"I shouldn't wonder," said Filmore. "We heard something happened to you in '43."
"Was in a somewhat-profitable operation out of Egypt while the Afrika Korps was
falling apart. Taking people in and out for a fee in a nominally neutral air
fleet. Just a sideline. Then ran into that hotshot flier."
"Who?"
"Kid with the jet plane, before the Germans had them."
"Tell you the truth, boss, I didn't keep up with the war much. I take a long
view on merely territorial conflicts."
"As I should have," said Dr. Tod. "We were flying out of Tunisia. Some important
people were with us that trip. The pilot screamed. There was a tremendous
explosion. Next thing, I came to, it was the next morning, and me and one other
person are in a life raft in the middle of the Mediterranean. My face hurt. I
lifted up. Something fell into the bottom of the raft. It was my left eyeball.
It was looking up at me. I knew I was in trouble."
"You said it was a kid with a jet plane?" asked Ed. "Yes. We found out later
they'd broken our code, and he'd flown six hundred miles to intercept us."
"You want to get even?" asked Filmore.
"No. That was so long ago I hardly remember that side of my face. It just taught
me to be a little more cautious. I wrote it off as character building."
"So no plans, huh?"
"Not a single one," said Dr. Tod.
"That'll be nice for a change," said Filmore. They watched the lights of the
city go by.
He knocked on the door, uncomfortable in his new brown suit and vest.
"Come on in, its open," said a woman's voice. Then it was muffled. "I'll be
ready in just a minute."
Jetboy opened the oak hall door and stepped into the room, past the glass-brick
room divider.
A beautiful woman stood in the middle of the room, a dress halfway over her arms
and head. She wore a camisole, garter belt, and silk hose. She was pulling the
dress down with one of her hands.
Jetboy turned his head away, blushing and taken aback. "Oh," said the woman.
"Ohl I-who?"
"It's me, Belinda," he said. "Robert."
"Robert?"
"Bobby, Bobby Tomlin."
She stared at him a moment, her hands clasped over her front though she was
fully dressed.
"Oh, Bobby," she said, and came to him and hugged him and gave him a big kiss
right on the mouth.
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It was what he had waited six years for.
"Bobby. It's great to see you. I-I was expecting someone else. Some-girlfriends.
How did you find me?"
"Well, it wasn't easy"
She stepped back from him. "Let me look at you." He looked at her. The last time
he had seen her she was fourteen, a tomboy, still at the orphanage. She had been
a thin kid with mousy blond hair. Once, when she was eleven, she'd almost
punched his lights out. She was a year older than he. Then he had gone away, to
work at the airfield, then to fight with the Brits against Hitler. He had
written her when he could all during the war, after America entered it. She had
left the orphanage and been put in a foster home. In '44 one of his letters had
come back from there marked 'Moved-No Forwarding Address.' Then he had been lost
all during the last year.. "You've changed, too," he said.
"So have you."
"Uh."
"I followed the newspapers all during the war. I tried to write you but I don't
guess the letters ever caught up with you. Then they said you were missing at
sea, and I sort of gave up."
"Well, I was, but they found me. Now I'm back. How have you been?"
"Real good, once I ran away from the foster home," she said. A look of pain came
across her face. "You don't know how glad I was to get away from there. Oh,
Bobby," she said. "Oh, I wish things was different!" She started to cry a
little.
"Hey," he said, holding her by the shoulders. "Sit down. I've got something for
you."
"A present?"
"Yep." He handed her a grimy, oil-stained paper parcel. "I carried these with me
the last two years of the war. They were in the plane with me on the island.
Sorry I didn't have time to rewrap them."
She tore the English butcher paper. Inside were copies of The House at Pooh
Corner and The Tale of the Fierce Bad Rabbit.
"Oh," said Belinda. "Thank you."
He remembered her dressed in the orphanage coveralls, just in, dusty and tired
from a baseball game, lying on the reading-room floor with a Pooh book open
before her.
"The Pooh book's signed by the real Christopher Robin," he said. "I found out he
was an RAF officer at one of the bases in England. He said he usually didn't do
this sort of thing, that he was just another airman. I told him I wouldn't tell
anyone. I'd searched high and low to find a copy, and he knew that, though."
"This other one's got more of a story behind it. I was coming back near dusk,
escorting some crippled B-17s. I looked up and saw two German night fighters
coming in, probably setting up patrol, trying to catch some Lancasters before
they went out over the Channel."
"To make a long story short, I shot down both of them; they packed in near a
small village. But I had run out of fuel and had to set down. Saw a pretty flat
sheep pasture with a lake at the far end of it, and went in. When I climbed out
of the cockpit, I saw a lady and a sheepdog standing at the edge of the field.
She had a shotgun. When she got close enough to see the engines and the decals,
she said, "Good shooting! Won't you come in for a bite of supper and to use the
telephone to call Fighter Command?" We could see the two ME-110s burning in the
distance. `You're the very famous Jetboy.' she said, 'We have followed your
exploits in the Sawrey paper. I'm Mrs. Heelis.' She held out her hand."
"I shook it. `Mrs. William Heelis? And this is Sawrey?' 'Yes,' she said."
"'You're Beatrix Potter!' I said."
"'I suppose I am,' she said."
"Belinda, she was this stout old lady in a raggedy sweater and a plain old
dress. But when she smiled, I swear, all of England lit up!"
Belinda opened the book. On the flyleaf was written
To Jetboy's American Friend, Belinda,
from Mrs. William Heelis ("Beatrix Potter")
12 April 1943
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Jetboy drank the coffee Belinda made for him. "Where are your friends?" he
asked.
"Well, he they should have been here by now. I was thinking of going down the
hall to the phone and trying to call them. I can change, and we can sit around
and talk about old times. I really can call."
"No," said Jetboy "Tell you what. I'll call you later on in the week; we can get
together some night when you're not busy. That would be fun."
"Sure would." Jetboy got up to go.
"Thank you for the books, Bobby. They mean a lot to me, they really do."
"It's real good to see you again, Bee."
Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!
"Nobody's called me that since the orphanage. Call me real soon, will you?"
"Sure will." He leaned down and kissed her again.
He walked to the stairs. As he was going down, a guy in a modified zoot
suit-pegged pants, long coat, watch chain, bow tie the size of a coat hanger,
hair slicked back, reeking of Brylcreem and Old Spice-went up the stairs two at
a time, whistling "It Ain't the Meat, It's the Motion."
Jetboy heard him knocking at Belinda's door. Outside, it had begun to rain.
"Great. Just like in a movie," said Jetboy.
The next night was quiet as a graveyard.
Then dogs all over the Pine Barrens started to bark. Cats screamed. Birds flew
in panic from thousands of trees, circled, swooping this way and that in the
dark night.
Static washed over every radio in the northeastern United States. New television
sets flared out, volume doubling. People gathered around nine-inch Dumonts
jumped back at the sudden noise and light, dazzled in their own living rooms and
bars and sidewalks outside appliance stores all over the East Coast.
To those out in that hot August night it was even more spectacular. A thin line
of light, high up, moved, brightened, still falling. Then it expanded, upping in
brilliance, changed into a blue-green bolide, seemed to stop, then flew to a
hundred falling sparks that slowly faded on the dark starlit sky. Some people
said they saw another, smaller light a few minutes later. It seemed to hover,
then sped off to the west, growing dimmer as it flew. The newspapers had been
full of stories of the "ghost rockets" in Sweden all that summer. It was the
silly season.
A few calls to the weather bureau or Army Air Force bases got the answer that it
was probably a stray from the Delta Aquarid meteor shower.
Out in the Pine Barrens, somebody knew differently, though he wasn't in the mood
to communicate it to anyone.
Jetboy, dressed in a loose pair of pants, a shirt, and a brown aviator's jacket,
walked in through the doors of the Blackwell Printing Company. There was a
bright red-and-blue sign above the door: Home of the Cosh Comics Company. He
stopped at the receptionist's desk.
"Robert Tomlin to see Mr. Farrell."
The secretary, a thin blond job in glasses with swept-up rims that made it look
like a bat was camping on her face, stared at him. "Mr. Farrell passed on in the
winter of 1945. Were you in the service or something?"
"Something."
"Would you like to speak to Mr. Lowboy? He has Mr. Farrell's job now."
"Whoever's in charge of Jetboy Comics."
The whole place began shaking as printing presses cranked up in the back of the
building. On the walls of the office were garish comic-book covers, promising
things only they could deliver.
"Robert Tomlin," said the secretary to the intercom. "Scratch squawk never heard
of him squich." "What was this about?" asked the secretary.
"Tell him Jetboy wants to see him."
"Oh," she said, looking at him. "I'm sorry. I didn't recognize you."
"Nobody ever does."
Lowboy looked like a gnome with all the blood sucked out. He was as pale as
Harry Langdon must have been, like a weed grown under a burlap bag.
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"Jetboy!" He held out a hand like a bunch of grub worms. "We all thought you'd
died until we saw the papers last week. You're a real national hero, you know?"
"I don't feel like one."
"What can I do for you? Not that I'm not pleased to finally meet you. But you
must be a busy man."
"Well, first, I found out none of the licensing and royalty checks had been
deposited in my account since I was reported Missing and Presumed Dead last
summer."
"What, really? The legal department must have put it in escrow or something
until somebody came forward with a claim. I'll get them right on it."
"Well, I'd like the check now, before I leave," said Jetboy. "Huh? I don't know
if they can do that. That sounds awfully abrupt."
Jetboy stared at him.
"Okay, okay, let me call Accounting." He yelled into the telephone.
"Oh," said Jetboy. "A friend's been collecting my copies. I checked the
statement of ownership and circulation for the last two years. I know Jetboy
Comics have been selling five hundred thousand copies an issue lately."
Lowboy yelled into the phone some more. He put it down. "It'll take 'em a little
while. Anything else?"
"I don't like what's happening to the funny book," said Jetboy.
"What's not to like? It's selling a half a million copies a monthl"
"For one thing, the plane's getting to look more and more like a bullet. And the
artists have swept back the wings, for Christ's sakesl"
"This is the Atomic Age, kid. Boys nowadays don't like a plane that looks like a
red leg of lamb with coat hangers sticking out the front."
"Well, it's always looked like that. And another thing: Why's the damned plane
blue in the last three issues?"
"Not mel I think red's fine. But Mr. Blackwell sent down a memo, said no more
red except for blood. He's a big Legionnaire."
"Tell him the plane has to look right, and be the right color. Also, the combat
reports were forwarded. When Farrell was sitting at your desk, the comic was
about flying and combat, and cleaning up spy rings-real stuff. And there were
never more than two ten-page Jetboy stories an issue."
"When Farrell was at this desk, the book was only selling a quarter-million
copies a month," said Lowboy.
Robert stared at him again.
"I know the war's over, and everybody wants a new house and eye-bulging
excitement," said Jetboy. "But look what I find in the last eighteen months ."
"I never fought anyone like The Undertaker, anyplace called The Mountain of
Doom. And come on! The Red Skeleton? Mr. Maggot? Professor Blooteaux? What is
this with all the skulls and tentacles? I mean, evil twins named Sturm and Drang
Hohenzollern? The Arthropod Ape, a gorilla with six sets of elbows? Where do you
get all this stuff?"
"It's not me, it's the writers. They're a crazy bunch, always taking Benzedrine
and stuff. Besides, it's what the kids want!"
"What about the flying features, and the articles on real aviation heroes? I
thought my contract called for at least two features an issue on real events and
people?"
"We'll have to look at it again. But I can tell you, kids don't want that kind
of stuff anymore. They want monsters, spaceships, stuff that'll make 'em wet the
bed. You remember? You were a kid once yourself!"
Jetboy picked up a pencil from the desk. "I was thirteen when the war started,
fifteen when they bombed Pearl Harbor. I've been in combat for six years.
Sometimes I don't think I was ever a kid."
Lowboy was quiet a moment.
"Tell you what you need to do," he said. "You need to write up all the stuff you
don't like about the book and send it to us. I'll have the legal department go
over it, and we'll try to do something, work things out. Of course, we print
three issues ahead, so it'll be Thanksgiving before the new stuff shows up. Or
later."
Jetboy sighed. "I understand."
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file:///F|/rah/George%20R.%20R.%20Martin/Martin,%20George%20R.%20R%20-%2Wildcards%201%20-%20Wildcards.txtWildcardsWildcardsBook1ofWildcardsEditedbyGeorgeR.R.MartinISBN:0-553-26190-8PROLOGUEFromWildTimes:AnOralHistoryofthePostwarYears,byStudsTerkel(Pantheon,1979).HerbertL.CranstonYearslater,whenIsa...

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