Walter Jon Williams - Witness

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Witness

Walter Jon Williams

Author's Note: "Witness" is a contribution to the Wild Cards shared-world series, but it stands largely

on its own. In order to understand its premise, only a few things need to be explained. An alien, known

on Earth as Dr. Tachyon, developed the gene-warping wild card virus, which killed most of its victims

horribly, which mutilated most of the survivors, and which, to a lucky few, granted genuine

superpowers. In an alternate 1946, Jetboy, a famous World War II ace, died in an unsuccessful attempt

to prevent terrorists from detonating a wild card bomb over Manhattan. The story begins only a few

minutes after Jetboy's death, as viral spores begin to rain on the city.

The part of the story I didn't make up consists of the HUAC persecutions of the late --40s and '50s. A

depressing feature of this story was hearing from young (and a few not-so-young) readers who assume

that I invented the McCarthy Period for the purposes of this alternate-worlds story. I can only hope that

this disbelief is a measure of how far we've come since the days of HUAC, that it really can't happen

again, rather than an indication of the political naivetÃ© that allowed it all to occur in the first place.

W.J.W.

* * * *

When Jetboy died I was watching a matinee of The Jolson Story. I wanted to see Larry Parks's

performance, which everyone said was so remarkable. I studied it carefully and made mental notes.

Young actors do things like that.

The picture ended, but I was feeling comfortable and had no plans for the next few hours, and I wanted

to see Larry Parks again. I watched the movie a second time. Halfway through, I fell asleep, and when I

woke the titles were scrolling up. I was alone in the theater.

When I stepped into the lobby the usherettes were gone and the doors were locked. They'd run for it and

forgotten to tell the projectionist. I let myself out into a bright, pleasant autumn afternoon and saw that

Second Avenue was empty.

Second Avenue is never empty.

The newsstands were closed. The few cars I could see were parked. The theater marquee had been

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Witness

turned off. I could hear angry auto horns some distance off, and over it the rumble of high-powered

airplane engines. There was a bad smell from somewhere.

New York had the eerie feeling that towns sometimes got during an air raid, deserted and waiting and

nervous. I'd been in air raids during the war, usually on the receiving end, and I didn't like the feeling at

all. I began walking for my apartment, just a block and a half away.

In the first hundred feet I saw what had been making the bad smell. It came from a reddish-pink puddle

that looked like several gallons of oddly colored ice cream melting on the sidewalk and oozing down the

gutter.

I looked closer. There were a few bones inside the puddle. A human jawbone, part of a tibia, an eye

socket. They were dissolving into a light pink froth.

There were clothes beneath the puddle. An usherette's uniform. Her flashlight had rolled into the gutter

and the metal parts of it were dissolving along with her bones.

My stomach turned over as adrenaline slammed into my system. I started to run.

By the time I got to my apartment I figured there had to be some kind of emergency going on, and I

turned on the radio to get information. While I was waiting for the Philco to warm up I went to check the

canned food in the cupboard--a couple cans of Campbell's was all I could find. My hands were shaking

so much I knocked one of the cans out of the cupboard, and it rolled off the sideboard behind the icebox.

I pushed against the side of the icebox to get at the can, and suddenly it seemed like there was a shift in

the light and the icebox flew halfway across the room and damn near went through the wall. The pan I

had underneath to catch the ice-melt slopped over onto the floor.

I got the can of soup. My hands were still trembling. I moved the icebox back, and it was light as a

feather. The light kept doing weird shifts. I could pick up the box with one hand.

The radio warmed finally and I learned about the virus. People who felt sick were to report to emergency

tent hospitals set up by the National Guard all over the city. There was one in Washington Square Park,

near where I was living.

I didn't feel sick, but on the other hand I could juggle the icebox, which was not exactly normal

behavior. I walked to Washington Square Park. There were casualties everywhere--some were just lying

in the street. I couldn't look at a lot of it. It was worse than anything I'd seen in the war. I knew that as

long as I was healthy and mobile the doctors would put me low on the list for treatment, and it would be

days before I'd get any help, so I walked up to someone in charge, told him I used to be in the Army, and

asked what I could do to help. I figured if I started to die I'd at least be near the hospital.

The doctors asked me to help set up a kitchen. People were screaming and dying and changing before

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Witness

the doctors' eyes, and the medics couldn't do anything about it. Feeding the casualties was all they could

think to do.

I went to a National Guard deuce-and-a-half and started picking up crates of food. Each weighed about

fifty pounds, and I stacked six of them on top of each other and carried them off the truck in one arm.

My perception of the light kept changing in odd ways. I emptied the truck in about two minutes. Another

truck had gotten bogged down in mud when it tried to cross the park, so I picked up the whole truck and

carried it to where it was supposed to be, and then I unloaded it and asked the doctors if they needed me

for anything else.

I had this strange glow around me. People told me that when I did one of my stunts I glowed, that a

bright golden aura surrounded my body. My looking at the world through my own radiance made the

light appear to change.

I didn't think much about it. The scene around me was overwhelming, and it went on for days. People

were drawing the black queen or the joker, turning into monsters, dying, transforming. Martial law had

slammed down on the city--it was just like wartime. After the first riots on the bridges there were no

disturbances. The city had lived with blackouts and curfews and patrols for four years, and the people

just slipped back into wartime patterns. The rumors were insane--a Martian attack, accidental release of

poison gas, bacteria released by Nazis or by Stalin. To top it all off, several thousand people swore they

saw Jetboy's ghost flying, without his plane, over the streets of Manhattan. I went on working at the

hospital, moving heavy loads. That's where I met Tachyon.

He came by to deliver some experimental serum he was hoping might be able to relieve some

symptoms, and at first I thought, Oh, Christ, here's some fruitbar got past the guards with a potion his

Aunt Nelly gave him. He was a weedy guy with long metallic red hair past his shoulders, and I knew it

couldn't be a natural color. He dressed as if he got his clothes from a Salvation Army in the theater

district, wearing a bright orange jacket like a bandleader might wear, a red Harvard sweater, a Robin

Hood hat with a feather, plus-fours with argyle socks, and two-tone shoes that would have looked out of

place on a pimp. He was moving from bed to bed with a tray full of hypos, observing each patient and

sticking the needles in people's arms. I put down the X-ray machine I was carrying and ran to stop him

before he could do any harm.

And then I noticed that the people following him included a three-star general, the National Guard bird

colonel who ran the hospital, and Mr. Archibald Holmes, who was one of F.D.R.--s old crowd at

Agriculture, and who I recognized right away. He'd been in charge of a big relief agency in Europe

following the war, but Truman had sent him to New York as soon as the plague hit. I sidled up behind

one of the nurses and asked her what was going on.

"That's a new kind of treatment," she said. "That Dr. Tack-something brought it."

"It's his treatment?" I asked.

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Witness

"Yeah." She looked at him with a frown. "He's from another planet."

I looked at the plus-fours and Robin Hood hat. "No kidding," I said.

"No. Really. He is."

Closer up, you could see the dark circles under his weird purple eyes, the strain that showed on his face.

He'd been pushing himself hard since the catastrophe, like all the doctors here--like everyone except me.

I felt full of energy in spite of only getting a few hours' sleep each night.

The bird colonel from the National Guard looked at me. "Here's another case," he said. "This is Jack

Braun."

Tachyon looked up at me. "Your symptoms?" he asked. He had a deep voice, a vaguely mid-European

accent.

"I'm strong. I can pick up trucks. I glow gold when I do it."

He seemed excited. "A biological force field. Interesting. I'd like to examine you later. After the"--an

expression of distaste crossed his face--"present crisis is over."

"Sure, Doc. Whatever you like."

He moved on to the next bed. Mr. Holmes, the relief man, didn't follow. He just stayed and watched me,

fiddling with his cigarette holder.

I stuck my thumbs in my belt and tried to look useful. "Can I help you with something, Mr. Holmes?" I

asked.

He seemed mildly surprised. "You know my name?" he said.

"I remember you coming to Fayette, North Dakota, back in --33," I said. "Just after the New Deal came

in. You were at Agriculture then."

"A long time ago. What are you doing in New York, Mr. Braun?"

"I was an actor till the theaters shut down."

"Ah." He nodded. "We'll have the theaters running again soon. Dr. Tachyon tells us the virus isn't

contagious."

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Witness

"That'll ease some minds."

He glanced at the entrance to the tent. "Let's go outside and have a smoke."

"Suits me." After I followed him out I dusted off my hands and accepted a custom-blended cigarette

from his silver case. He lit our cigarettes and looked at me over the match.

"After the emergency's over, I'd like to run some more tests with you," he said. "Just see what it is that

you can do."

I shrugged. "Sure, Mr. Holmes," I said. "Any particular reason?"

"Maybe I can give you a job," he said. "On the world stage."

Something passed between me and the sun. I looked up, and a cold finger touched my neck.

The ghost of Jetboy was flying black against the sky, his white pilot's scarf fluttering in the wind.

* * * *

I'd grown up in North Dakota. I was born in 1924, into hard times. There was trouble with the banks,

trouble with the farm surpluses that were keeping prices down. When the Depression hit, things went

from bad to worse. Grain prices were so low that some farmers literally had to pay people to haul the

stuff away. Farm auctions were held almost every week at the courthouse--farms worth fifty thousand

dollars were selling for a few hundred. Half Main Street was boarded up.

Those were the days of the Farm Holidays, the farmers withholding grain to make the prices rise. I'd get

up in the middle of the night to bring coffee and food to my father and cousins, who were patrolling the

roads to make sure nobody sold grain behind their backs. If someone came by with grain, they'd seize

the truck and dump it; if a cattle truck came by, they'd shoot the cattle and toss them on the roadside to

rot. Some of the local bigwigs who were making a fortune buying underpriced wheat sent the American

Legion to break the farm strike, carrying axe handles and wearing their little hats--and the whole district

rose, gave the legionnaires the beating of their lives, and sent them scampering back to the city.

Suddenly a bunch of conservative German farmers were talking and acting like radicals. F.D.R. was the

first Democrat my family ever voted for.

I was eleven years old when I first saw Archibald Holmes. He was working as a troubleshooter for Mr.

Henry Wallace in the Department of Agriculture, and he came to Fayette to consult with the farmers

about something or other--price control or production control, probably, or conservation, the New Deal

agenda that kept our farm off the auction block. He gave a little speech on the courthouse steps on his

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Walter Jon Williams - Witness

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