Wild Cards

  At 2:31 it was still moving slowly toward the city at an altitude of nearly sixty thousand feet.

  At 2:41 they blew the first of the air-raid sirens, which had not been used in New York City since April of 1945 in a blackout drill.

  By 2:48 there was panic.

  Someone in the CD office hit the wrong set of switches. The power went off everywhere except hospitals and police and fire stations. Subways stopped. Things shut down, and traffic lights quit working. Half the emergency equipment, which hadn't been checked since the end of the war, failed to come up.

  The streets were jammed with people. Cops rushed out to try to direct traffic. Some of the policemen panicked when they were issued gas masks. Telephones jammed. Fistfights broke out at intersections, people were trampled at subway exits and on the stairs of skyscrapers.

  The bridges clogged up.

  Conflicting orders came down. Get the people into bomb shelters. No, no, evacuate the island. Two cops on the same corner yelled conflicting orders at the crowds. Mostly people just stood around and looked.

  Their attention was soon drawn to something in the southeastern sky. It was small and shiny.

  Flak began to bloom ineffectually two miles below it.

  On and on it came.

  When the guns over in Jersey began to fire, the panic really started.

  It was 3 P.M.

  “It's really quite simple,” said Dr. Tod. He looked down toward

  Manhattan, which lay before him like a treasure trove. He turned to Filmore and held up a long cylindrical device that looked like the offspring of a pipe bomb and a combination lock. “Should anything happen to me, simply insert this fuse in the holder in the explosives”—he indicated the taped-over portion with the opening in the canister covered with the Sanskrit-like lettering—“twist it to the number five hundred, then pull this lever.” He indicated the bomb-bay door latch. “It'll fall of its own weight, and I was wrong about the bombsights. Pinpoint accuracy is not our goal.”

  He looked at Filmore through the grill of his diving helmet. They all wore diving suits with hoses leading back to a central oxygen supply.

  “Make sure, of course, everyone's suited with their helmet on. Your blood would boil in this thin air. And these suits only have to hold pressure for the few seconds the bomb door's open.”

  “I don't expect no trouble, boss.”

  “Neither do I. After we bomb New York City, we go out to our rendezvous with the ship, rip the ballast, set down, and head for Europe. They'll be only too glad to pay us the money then. They have no way of knowing we'll be using the whole germ weapon. Seven million or so dead should quite convince them we mean business.”

  “Look at that,” said Ed, from the copilot's seat. “Way down there. Flak!”

  “What's our altitude?” asked Dr. Tod.

  “Right on fifty-eight thousand feet,” said Fred.

  “Target?”

  Ed sighted, checked a map. “Sixteen miles straight ahead. You sure called those wind currents just right, Dr. Tod.”

  * * *

  They had sent him to an airfield outside Washington, D.C., to wait. That way he would be within range of most of the major East Coast cities.

  He had spent part of the day reading, part asleep, and the rest of it talking over the war with some of the other pilots. Most of them, though, were too new to have fought in any but the closing days of the war.

  Most of them were jet pilots, like him, who had done their training in P–59 Airacomets or P–80 Shooting Stars. A few of those in the ready room belonged to a P–51 prop-jot squadron. There was a bit of tension between the blowtorch jockeys and the piston eaters.

  All of them were a new breed, though. Already there was talk Truman was going to make the Army Air Force into a separate branch, just the Air Force, within the next year. Jetboy felt, at nineteen, that time had passed him by.

  “They're working on something,” said one of the pilots, “that'll go through the sonic wall. Bell's behind it.”

  “A friend of mine out at Muroc says wait till they get the Flying Wing in operation. They're already working on an all-jet version of it. A bomber that can go thirteen thousand miles at five hundred per, carries a crew of thirteen, bunk beds for seven, can stay up for a day and a half!” said another.

  “Anybody know anything about this alert?” asked a very young, nervous guy with second-looie bars. “The Russians up to something?”

  “I heard we were going to Greece,” said someone. “Ouzo for me, gallons of it.”

  “More like Czech potato-peel vodka. We'll be lucky if we see Christmas.”

  Jetboy realized he missed ready-room banter more than he had thought.

  The intercom hissed on and a klaxon began to wail. Jetboy looked at his watch. It was 2:25 P.M.

  He realized he missed something more than Air Corps badinage. That was flying. Now it all came back to him. When he had flown down to Washington the night before it had been just a routine hop.

  Now was different. It was like wartime again. He had a vector. He had a target. He had a mission.

  He also had on an experimental Navy T–2 pressure suit. It was a girdle manufacturer's dream, all rubber and laces, pressure bottles, and a real space helmet, like out of Planet Comics, over his head. They had fitted him for it the night before, when they saw his high-altitude wings and drop tanks on the plane.

  “We'd better tailor this down for you,” the flight sergeant had said.

  “I've got a pressurized cabin,” said Jetboy.

  “Well, in case they need you, and in case something goes wrong, then.”

  The suit was still too tight, and it wasn't pressurized yet. The arms were built for a gorilla, and the chest for a chimpanzee. “You'll appreciate the extra room if that thing ever inflates in an emergency,” said the sergeant.

  “You're the boss,” said Jetboy.

  They'd even painted the torso white and the legs red to match his outfit. His blue helmet and goggles showed through the clear plastic bubble.

  As he climbed with the rest of the squadron, he was glad now that he had the thing. His mission was to accompany the flight of P–80s in, and to engage only if needed. He had never exactly been a team player.

  The sky ahead was blue as the background curtain in Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, with a two-fifths cloud to the north. The sun stood over his left shoulder. The squadron angled up. He wigwagged the wings. They spread out in a staggered box and cleared their guns.

  Chunder chunder chunder chunder went his 20mm cannons.

  Tracers arced out ahead from the six .50 cals on each P–80. They left the prop planes far behind and pointed their noses toward Manhattan.

  They looked like a bunch of angry bees circling under a hawk.

  The sky was filled with jets and prop fighters climbing like the wall clouds of a hurricane.

  Above was a lumpy object that hung and moved slowly on toward the city. Where the eye of the hurricane would be was a torrent of flak, thicker than Jetboy had ever seen over Europe or Japan.

  It was bursting far too low, only at the level of the highest fighters.

  Fighter Control called them. “Clark Gable Command to all squadrons. Target at five five zero . . . repeat, five five zero angels. Moving ENE at two five knots. Flak unable to reach.”

  “Call it off,” said the squadron leader. “We'll try to fly high enough for deflection shooting. Squadron Hodiak, follow me.”

  Jetboy looked up into the high blue above. The object continued its slow track.

  “What's it got?” he asked Clark Gable Command.

  “Command to Jetboy. Some type of bomb is what we've been told. It has to be a lighter-than-air craft of at least five hundred thousand cubic feet to reach that altitude. Over.”

  “I'm beginning a climb. If the other planes can't reach it, call them off, too.”

  There was silence on the radio, then, “Roger.”

  As the P–80s glinted like silver cruc
ifixes above him, he eased the nose up.

  “Come on, baby,” he said. “Let's do some flying.”

  The Shooting Stars began to fall away, sideslipping in the thin air. Jetboy could hear only the sound of his own pressure-breathing in his ears, and the high thin whine of his engines.

  “Come on, girl,” he said. “You can make it!”

  The thing above him had resolved itself into a bastard aircraft made of half a dozen blimps, with a gondola below it. The gondola looked as if it had once been a PT boat shell. That was all he could see. Beyond it, the air was purple and cold. Next stop, outer space.

  The last of the P–80s slid sideways on the blue stairs of the sky. A few had made desultory firing runs, some snap-rolling as fighters used to do underneath bombers in the war. They fired as they nosed up. All their tracers fell away under the balloons.

  One of the P–80s fought for control, dropping two miles before leveling out.

  Jetboy's plane protested, whining. It was hard to control. He eased the nose up again, had to fight it.

  “Get everybody out of the way,” he said to Clark Gable Command.

  “Here's where we give you some fighting room,” he said to his plane. He blew the drop tanks. They fell away like bombs behind him. He pushed his cannon button. Chunder chunder chunder chunder they went. Then again and again.

  His tracers arced toward the target, then they too fell away. He fired four more bursts until his cannon ran dry. Then he cleaned out the twin fifties in the tail, but it didn't take long for all one hundred rounds to be spent.

  He nosed over and went into a shallow dive, like a salmon sounding to throw a hook, gaining speed. A minute into the run he nosed up, putting the JB–1 into a long circling climb.

  “Feels better, huh?” he asked.

  The engines bit into the air. The plane, relieved of the weight, lurched up and ahead.

  Below him was Manhattan with its seven million people. They must be watching down there, knowing these might be the last things they ever saw. Maybe this is what living in the Atomic Age would be like, always be looking up and thinking, Is this it?

  Jetboy reached down with one of his boots and slammed a lever over. A 75mm cannon shell slid into the breech. He put his hand on the autoload bar, and pulled back a little more on the control wheel.

  The red jet cut the air like a razor.

  He was closer now, closer than the others had gotten, and still not close enough. He only had five rounds to do the job.

  The jet climbed, beginning to stagger in the thin air, as if it were some red animal clawing its way up a long blue tapestry that slipped a little each time the animal lurched.

  He pointed the nose up.

  Everything seemed frozen, waiting.

  A long thin line of machine-gun tracers reached out from the gondola for him like a lover.

  He began to fire his cannon.

  From the statement of Patrolman Francis V.

  (“Francis the Talking Cop”) O'Hooey,

  Sept. 15, 1946, 6:45 P.M.

  We was watching from the street over at Sixth Avenue, trying to get people from shoving each other in a panic. Then they calmed down as they was watching the dogfights and stuff up above.

  Some birdwatcher had this pair of binocs, so I confiscated 'em. I watched pretty much the whole thing. Them jets wasn't having no luck, and the antiaircraft from over in the Bowery wasn't doing no good either. I still say the Army oughta be sued 'cause them Air Defense guys got so panicky they forgot to set the timers on them shells and I heard that some of them came down in the Bronx and blew up a whole block of apartments.

  Anyway, this red plane, that is, Jetboy's plane, was climbing up and he fired all his bullets, I thought, without doing any damage to the balloon thing.

  I was out on the street, and this fire truck pulls up with its sirens on, and the whole precinct and auxiliaries were on it, and the lieutenant was yelling for me to climb on, we'd been assigned to the west side to take care of a traffic smash-up and a riot.

  So I jump on the truck, and I try to keep my eyes on what's happening up in the skies.

  The riot was pretty much over. The air-raid sirens was still wailing, but everybody was just standing around gawking at what was happening up there.

  The lieutenant yells to at least get the people in the buildings. I pushed a few in some doors, then I took another gander in the field glasses.

  “I'll be damned if Jetboy hasn't shot up some of the balloons (I hear he used his howitzer on 'em) and the thing looks bigger—it's dropping some. But he's out of ammo and not as high as the thing is and he starts circlin'.

  I forgot to say, all the time this blimp thing is got so many machine guns going it looks like a Fourth of July sparkler, and Jetboy's plane's taking these hits all the time.

  Then he just takes his plane around and comes right back and crashes right into the what-you-call-it—the gondola, that's it, on the blimps. They just sort of merged together. He must have been going awful slow by then, like stalling, and the plane just sort of mashed into the side of the thing.

  And the blimp deal looked like it was coming down a little, not a lot, just some. Then the lieutenant took the glasses away from me, and I shaded my eyes and watched as best I could.

  There was this flare of light. I thought the whole thing had blown up at first, and I ducked up under a car. But when I looked up the blimps was still there.

  “Look out! Get inside!” yelled the lieutenant. Everybody had another panic then, and was jumping under cars and around stuff and through windows. It looked like a regular Three Stooges for a minute or two.

  A few minutes later, it rained red airplane parts all over the streets, and a bunch on the Hudson Terminal . . .

  There was steam and fire all around. The cockpit cracked like an egg, and the wings folded up like a fan. Jetboy jerked as the capstans in the pressure suit inflated. He was curved into a circle, and must have looked like a frightened tomcat.

  The gondola walls had parted like a curtain where the fighter's wings crumpled into it. A wave of frost formed over the shattered cockpit as oxygen blew out of the gondola.

  Jetboy tore his hoses loose. His bailout bottle had five minutes of air in it. He grappled with the nose of the plane, like fighting against iron bands on his arms and legs. All you were supposed to be able to do in these suits was eject and pull the D-ring on your parachute.

  The plane lurched like a freight elevator with a broken cable. Jetboy grabbed a radar antenna with one gloved hand, felt it snap away from the broken nose of the plane. He grabbed another.

  The city was twelve miles below him, the buildings making the island look like a faraway porcupine. The left engine of his plane, crumpled and spewing fuel, tore loose and flew under the gondola. He watched it grow smaller.

  The air was purple as a plum—the skin of the blimps bright as fire in the sunlight, and the sides of the gondola bent and torn like cheap cardboard.

  The whole thing shuddered like a whale.

  Somebody flew by over Jetboy's head through the hole in the metal, trailing hoses like the arms of an octopus. Debris followed through the air in the explosive decompression.

  The jet sagged.

  Jetboy thrust his hand into the torn side of the gondola, found a strut.

  He felt his parachute harness catch on the radar array. The plane twisted. He felt its weight.

  He jerked his harness snap. His parachute packs were ripped away from him, tearing at his back and crotch.

  His plane bent in the middle like a snake with a broken back, then dropped away, the wings coming up and touching above the shattered cockpit as if it were a dove trying to beat its pinions. Then it twisted sideways, falling to pieces.

  Below it was the dot of the man who had fallen out of the gondola, spinning like a yard sprinkler toward the bright city far below.

  Jetboy saw the plane fall away beneath his feet. He hung in space twelve miles up by one hand.

  He gripped
his right wrist with his left hand, chinned himself up until he got a foot through the side, then punched his way in.

  There were two people left inside. One was at the controls, the other stood in the center behind a large round thing. He was pushing a cylinder into a slot in it. There was a shattered machine-gun turret on one side of the gondola.

  Jetboy reached for the service .38 strapped across his chest. It was agony reaching for it, agony trying to run toward the guy with the fuse.

  They wore diving suits. The suits were inflated. They looked like ten or twelve beach balls stuffed into suits of long underwear. They were moving as slowly as he was.

  Jetboy's hands closed in a claw over the handle of the .38. He jerked it from its holster.

  It flew out of his hand, bounced off the ceiling, and went out through the hole he had come in.

  The guy at the controls got off one shot at him. He dived toward the other man, the one with the fuse.

  His hand clamped on the diving-suited wrist of the other just as the man pushed the cylindrical fuse into the side of the round canister. Jetboy saw that the whole device sat on a hinged doorplate.

  The man had only half a face—Jetboy saw smooth metal on one side through the grid-plated diving helmet.

  The man twisted the fuse with both hands.

  Through the torn ceiling of the pilothouse, Jetboy saw another blimp begin to deflate. There was a falling sensation. They were dropping toward the city.

  Jetboy gripped the fuse with both hands. Their helmets clanged together as the ship lurched.

  The guy at the controls was putting on a parachute harness and heading toward the rent in the wall.

  Another shudder threw Jetboy and the man with the fuse together. The guy reached for the door lever behind him as best he could in the bulky suit.

  Jetboy grabbed his hands and pulled him back.

  They slammed together, draped over the canister, their hands entangled on each other's suits and the fuse to the bomb.

  The man tried again to reach the lever. Jetboy pulled him away. The canister rolled like a giant beach ball as the gondola listed.