Wild Cards Read online

  “The only thing is, we had better do all this from a phone booth. The MPs will be along, so I will have to talk quietly. Tell me,” he said, picking up his hat from the corner of a cluttered bookcase, “do you like ice cream?”

  “Lactose and sugar solids congealed in a mixture kept just below the freezing point?” asked the man.

  “I assure you,” said A.E., “it is better than it sounds, and quite refreshing.” Arm in arm, they went out the office door.

  Jetboy patted the scarred side of his plane. He stood in Hangar 23. Linc came out of his office, wiping his hands on a greasy rag.

  “Hey, how'd it go?” he asked.

  “Great. They want the book of memoirs. Going to be their big Spring book, if I get it in on time, or so they say.”

  “You still bound and determined to sell the plane?” asked the mechanic. “Sure hate to see her go.”

  “Well, that part of my life's over. I feel like if I never fly again, even as an airline passenger, it'll be too soon.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Jetboy looked at the plane.

  “Tell you what. Put on the high-altitude wing extensions and the drop tanks. It looks bigger and shinier that way. Somebody from a museum will probably buy it, is what I figure—I'm offering it to museums first. If that doesn't work, I'll take out ads in the papers. We'll take the guns out later, if some private citizen buys it. Check everything to see it's tight. Shouldn't have shaken much on the hop from San Fran, and they did a pretty good overhaul at Hickam Field. Whatever you think it needs.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I'll call you tomorrow, unless something can't wait.”

  HISTORICAL AIRCRAFT FOR SALE: Jetboy's twin-engine jet. 2 × 1200 lb thrust engines, speed 600 mph at 25,000 ft, range 650 miles, 1000 w/drop tanks (tanks and wing exts. inc.) length 31 ft, w/s 33 ft (49 w exts.) Reasonable offers accepted. Must see to appreciate. On view at Hangar 23, Bonham's Flying Service, Shantak, New Jersey.

  Jetboy stood in front of the bookstore window, looking at the pyramids of new titles there. You could tell paper rationing was off. Next year, his book would be one of them. Not just a comic book, but the story of his part in the war. He hoped it would be good enough so that it wouldn't be lost in the clutter.

  Seems like, in the words of someone, every goddamn barber and shoeshine boy who was drafted had written a book about how he won the war.

  There were six books of war memoirs in one window, by everyone from a lieutenant colonel to a major general (maybe those PFC barbers didn't write that many books?).

  Maybe they wrote some of the two dozen war novels that covered another window of the display.

  There were two books near the door, piles of them in a window by themselves, runaway best-sellers, that weren't war novels or memoirs. One was called The Grass-Hopper Lies Heavy by someone named Abendsen (Hawthorne Abendsen, obviously a pen name). The other was a thick book called Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms by someone so self-effacing she called herself “Mrs. Charles Fine Adams.” It must be a book of unreadable poems that the public, in its craziness, had taken up. There was no accounting for taste.

  Jetboy put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and walked to the nearest movie show.

  Tod watched the smoke rising from the lab and waited for the phone to ring. People ran back and forth to the building a half-mile away.

  There had been nothing for two weeks. Thorkeld, the scientist he'd hired to run the tests, had reported each day. The stuff didn't work on monkeys, dogs, rats, lizards, snakes, frogs, insects, or even on fish in suspension in water. Dr. Thorkeld was beginning to think Tod's men had paid twenty dollars for an inert gas in a fancy container.

  A few moments ago there had been an explosion. Now he waited.

  The phone rang.

  “Tod—oh, god, this is Jones at the lab, it's—” Static washed over the line. “Oh, sweet Jesus! Thorkeld's—they're all—” There was thumping near the phone receiver on the other end. “Oh, my . . .”

  “Calm down,” said Tod. “Is everyone outside the lab safe?”

  “Yeah, yeah. The . . . oooh.” The sound of vomiting came over the phone.

  Tod waited.

  “Sorry, Dr. Tod. The lab's still sealed off. The fire's—it's a small one on the grass outside. Somebody dropped a butt.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I was outside for a smoke. Somebody in there must have messed up, dropped something. I—I don't know. It's—they're most of them dead, I think. I hope. I don't know. Something's—wait, wait. There's someone still moving in the office, I can see from here, there's—”

  There was a click of someone picking up a receiver. The volume on the line dropped.

  “Tog, Tog,” said a voice, an approximation of a voice.

  “Who's there?”

  “Torgk—”

  “Thorkeld?”

  “Guh. Hep. Hep. Guh.”

  There was a sound like a sack full of squids being dumped on a corrugated roof. “Hep.” Then came the sound of jelly being emptied into a cluttered desk drawer.

  There was a gunshot, and the receiver bounced off the desk.

  “He—he shot—it—himself,” said Jones.

  “I'll be right out,” said Tod.

  After the cleanup, Tod stood in his office again. It had not been pretty. The canister was still intact. Whatever the accident had been had been with a sample. The other animals were okay. It was only the people. Three were dead outright. One, Thorkeld, had killed himself. Two others he and Jones had had to kill. A seventh person was missing, but had not come out any of the doors or windows.

  Tod sat down in his chair and thought a long, long time. Then he reached over and pushed the button on his desk.

  “Yeah, Doctor?” asked Filmore, stepping into the room with a batch of telegrams and brokerage orders under his arm.

  Dr. Tod opened the desk safe and began counting out bills. “Filmore. I'd like you to get down to Port Elizabeth, North Carolina, and buy me up five type B-limp balloons. Tell them I'm a car salesman. Arrange for one million cubic feet of helium to be delivered to the south Pennsy warehouse. Break out the hardware and give me a complete list of what we have—anything we need, we can get surplus. Get ahold of Captain Mack, see if he still has that cargo ship. We'll need new passports. Get me Cholley Sacks; I'll need a contact in Switzerland. I'll need a pilot with a lighter-than-air license. Some diving suits and oxygen. Shot ballast, couple of tons. A bombsight. Nautical charts. And bring me a cup of coffee.”

  “Fred has a lighter-than-air pilot's license,” said Filmore.

  “Those two never cease to amaze me,” said Dr. Tod.

  “I thought we'd pulled our last caper, boss.”

  “Filmore,” he said, and looked at the man he'd been friends with for twenty years, “Filmore, some capers you have to pull, whether you want to or not.”

  “Dewey was an Admiral at Manila Bay,

  Dewey was a candidate just the other day

  Dewey were her eyes when she said I do;

  Do we love each other? I should say we do!”

  The kids in the courtyard of the apartment jumped rope. They'd started the second they got home from school.

  At first it bothered Jetboy. He got up from the typewriter and went to the window. Instead of yelling, he watched.

  The writing wasn't going well, anyway. What had seemed like just the facts when he'd told them to the G–2 boys during the war looked like bragging on paper, once the words were down:

  Three planes, two ME–109s and a TA–152, came out of the clouds at the crippled B–24. It had suffered heavy flak damage. Two props were feathered and the top turret was missing.

  One of the 109s went into a shallow dive, probably going into a snap roll to fire up at the underside of the bomber.

  I eased my plane in a long turn and fired a deflection shot while about 700 yards away and closing. I saw three hits, then the 109 disintegrate
d.

  The TA–152 had seen me and dived to intercept. As the 109 blew up, I throttled back and hit my air brakes. The 152 flashed by less than 50 yards away. I saw the surprised look on the pilot's face. I fired one burst as he flashed by with my 20mms. Everything from his canopy back flew apart in a shower.

  I pulled up. The last 109 was behind the Liberator. He was firing with his machine guns and cannon. He'd taken out the tail gunner, and the belly turret couldn't get enough elevation. The bomber pilot was wigwagging the tail so the waist gunners could get a shot, but only the left waist gun was working.

  I was more than a mile away, but had turned above and to the right. I put the nose down and fired one round with the 75mm just before the gunsight flashed across the 109.

  The whole middle of the fighter disappeared—I could see France through it. The only image I have is that I was looking down on top of an open umbrella and somebody folded it suddenly. The fighter looked like Christmas-tree tinsel as it fell.

  Then the few gunners left on the B–24 opened up on me, not recognizing my plane. I flashed my IFF code, but their receiver must have been out.

  There were two German parachutes far below. The pilots of the first two fighters must have gotten out. I went back to my base.

  When they ran maintenance, they found one of my 75mm rounds missing, and only twelve 20mm shells. I'd shot down three enemy planes.

  I later learned the B–24 had crashed in the Channel and there were no survivors.

  Who needs this stuff? Jetboy thought. The war's over. Does anybody really want to read The Jet-Propelled Boy when it's published? Does anybody except morons even want to read Jetboy Comics anymore?

  I don't even think I'm needed. What can I do now? Fight crime? I can see strafing getaway cars full of bank robbers. That would be a real fair fight. Barnstorming? That went out with Hoover, and besides, I don't want to fly again. This year more people will fly on airliners on vacation than have been in the air all together in the last forty-three years, mail pilots, cropdusters, and wars included.

  What can I do? Break up a trust? Prosecute wartime profiteers? There's a real dead-end job for you. Punish mean old men who are robbing the state blind running orphanages and starving and beating the kids? You don't need me for that, you need Spanky and Alfalfa and Buckwheat.

  “A tisket, a tasket,

  Hitler's in a casket.

  Eenie-meenie-Mussolini,

  Six feet underground!”

  said the kids outside, now doing double-dutch, two ropes going opposite directions. Kids have too much energy, he thought. They hot-peppered a while, then slowed again.

  “Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep,

  Where old Hitler lies asleep.

  German boys, they tickle his feet,

  Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep!”

  Jetboy turned away from the window. Maybe what I need is to go to the movies again.

  Since his meeting with Belinda, he'd done nothing much but read, write, and go see movies. Before coming home, the last two movies he'd seen, in a crowded post auditorium in France in late '44, had been a cheesy double bill. That Nazty Nuisance, a United Artists film made in '43, with Bobby Watson as Hitler, and one of Jetboy's favorite character actors, Frank Faylen, had been the better of the two. The other was a PRC hunk of junk, Jive Junction, starring Dickie Moore, about a bunch of hepcats jitterbugging at the malt shop.

  The first thing he'd done after getting his money and finding an apartment, was to find the nearest movie theater, where he'd seen Murder, He Says about a house full of hillbilly weird people, with Fred McMurray and Marjorie Main, and an actor named Porter Hall playing identical twin-brother murderers named Bert and Mert. “Which one's which?” asks McMurray, and Marjorie Main picked up an axe handle and hit one of them in the middle of the back, where he collapsed from the waist up in a distorted caricature of humanity, but stayed on his feet. “That there's Mert,” says Main, throwing the axe handle on the woodpile. “He's got a trick back.” There was radium and homicide galore, and Jetboy thought it was the funniest movie he had ever seen.

  Since then he'd gone to the movies every day, sometimes going to three theaters and seeing from six to eight movies a day. He was adjusting to civilian life, like most soldiers and sailors had, by seeing films.

  He had seen Lost Weekend with Ray Milland, and Frank Faylen again, this time as a male nurse in a psycho ward; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; The Thin Man Goes Home, with William Powell at his alcoholic best; Bring on the Girls; It's in the Bag with Fred Allen; Incendiary Blonde; The Story of G.I. Joe (Jetboy had been the subject of one of Pyle's columns back in '43); a horror film called Isle of the Dead with Boris Karloff; a new kind of Italian movie called Open City at an art house; and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  And there were other films, Monogram and PRC and Republic westerns and crime movies, pictures he'd seen in twenty-four–hour nabes, but had forgotten about ten minutes after leaving the theaters. By the lack of star names and the 4–F look of the leading men, they'd been the bottom halves of double bills made during the war, all clocking in at exactly fifty-nine minutes running time.

  Jetboy sighed. So many movies, so much of everything he'd missed during the war. He'd even missed V–E and V–J Days, stuck on that island, before he and his plane had been found by the crew of the U.S.S. Reluctant. The way the guys on the Reluctant talked, you'd have thought they missed most of the war and the movies, too.

  He was looking forward to a lot of films this fall, and to seeing them when they came out, the way everybody else did, the way he'd used to do at the orphanage.

  Jetboy sat back down at the typewriter. If I don't work, I'll never get this book done. I'll go to the movies tonight.

  He began to type up all the exciting things he'd done on July 12, 1944.

  In the courtyard, women were calling kids in for supper as their fathers came home from work. A couple of kids were still jumping rope out there, their voices thin in the afternoon air:

  “Hitler, Hitler looks like this,

  Mussolini bows like this,

  Sonja Henie skates like this,

  And Betty Grable misses like this!”

  The Haberdasher in the White House was having a piss-ass of a day.

  It had started with a phone call a little after six A.M.—the Nervous Nellies over at the State Department had some new hot rumors from Turkey. The Soviets were moving all their men around on that nation's edges.

  “Well,” the Plain-speaking Man from Missouri said, “call me when they cross the goddamn border and not until.”

  Now this.

  Independence's First Citizen watched the door close. The last thing he saw was Einstein's heel disappearing. It needed half-soling.

  He sat back in his chair, lifted his thick glasses off his nose, rubbed vigorously. Then the President put his fingers together in a steeple, his elbows resting on his desk. He looked at the small model plow on the front of his desk (it had replaced the model of the M–1 Garand that had sat there from the day he took office until V–J Day). There were three books on the right corner of the desk—a Bible, a thumbed thesaurus, and a pictorial history of the United States. There were three buttons on his desk for calling various secretaries, but he never used them.

  Now that peace has come, I'm fighting to keep ten wars from breaking out in twenty places, there's strikes looming in every industry and that's a damn shame, people are hollering for more cars and refrigerators, and they're as tired as I am of war and war's alarm.

  And I have to kick the hornet's nest again, get everybody out looking for a damn germ bomb that might go off and infect the whole U.S. and kill half the people or more.

  We'd have been better off still fighting with sticks and rocks.

  The sooner I get my ass back to 219 North Delaware in Independence, the better off me and this whole damn country will be.

  Unless that son of a bitch Dewey wants to run for President again. Like Lincoln said, I'd rath
er swallow a deer-antler rocking chair than let that bastard be President.

  That's the only thing that'll keep me here when I've finished out Mr. Roosevelt's term.

  Sooner I get this snipe hunt under way, the faster we can put World War Number Two behind us.

  He picked up the phone.

  “Get me the Chiefs of Staff,” he said.

  “Major Truman speaking.”

  “Major, this is the other Truman, your boss. Put General Ostrander on the horn, will you?”

  While he was waiting he looked out past the window fan (he hated air-conditioning) into the trees. The sky was the kind of blue that quickly turns to brass in the summer.

  He looked at the clock on the wall: 10:23 A.M., eastern daylight time. What a day. What a year. What a century.

  “General Ostrander here, sir.”

  “General, we just had another bale of hay dropped on us . . .”

  * * *

  A couple of weeks later, the note came:

  Deposit 20 Million Dollars account # 43Z21, Credite Suisse, Berne, by 2300Z 14 Sept or lose a major city. You know of this weapon; your people have been searching for it. I have it; I will use half of it on the first city. The price goes to 30 Million Dollars to keep me from using it a second time. You have my word it will not be used if the first payment is made and instructions will be sent on where the weapon can be recovered.

  The Plain-speaking Man from Missouri picked up the phone.

  “Kick everything up to the top notch,” he said. “Call the cabinet, get the Joint Chiefs together. And Ostrander . . .”

  “Yessir?”

  “Better get ahold of that kid flier, what's his name? . . .”

  “You mean Jetboy, sir? He's not on active duty anymore.”

  “The hell he's not. He is now!”

  “Yessir.”

  It was 2:24 P.M. on the Tuesday of September 15, 1946, when the thing first showed up on the radar screens.