Wild Cards

  He looked directly into the eye of the man in the diving suit. The man used his feet to push the canister back over the bomb door. His hand went for the lever again.

  Jetboy gave the fuse a half-twist the other way.

  The man in the diving suit reached behind him. He came up with a .45 automatic. He jerked a heavy gloved hand away from the fuse, worked the slide. Jetboy saw the muzzle swing at him.

  “Die, Jetboy! Die!” said the man.

  He pulled the trigger four times.

  Statement of Patrolman Francis V. O'Hooey,

  Sept. 15, 1946, 6:45 P.M. (continued).

  So when the pieces of metal quit falling, we all ran out and looked up.

  I saw the white dot below the blimp thing. I grabbed the binocs away from the lieutenant.

  Sure enough, it was a parachute. I hoped it was Jetboy had bailed out when his plane crashed into the thing.

  I don't know much about such stuff, but I do know that you don't open a parachute that high up or you get in serious trouble.

  Then, while I was watching, the blimps and stuff all blew up, all at once. Like they was there, then there was this explosion, and there was only smoke and stuff way up in the air.

  The people all around started cheering. The kid had done it—he'd blown the thing up before it could drop the A-bomb on Manhattan Island.

  Then the lieutenant said to get in the truck, we'd try to get the kid.

  We jumped in and tried to figure out where he was gonna land. Everywhere we passed, people was standing in the middle of the car wrecks and fires and stuff, looking up and cheering the parachute.

  I noticed the big smudge in the air after the explosion, when we'd been driving around for ten minutes. Them other jets that had been with Jetboy was back, flying all around through the air, and some Mustangs and Thunderjugs, too. It was like a regular air show up there.

  Somehow we got out near the Bridge before anybody else did. Good thing, because when we got to the water, we saw this guy pile right in about twenty feet from shore. Went down like a rock. He was wearing this diving-suit thing, and we swam out and I grabbed part of the parachute and a fireman grabbed some of the hoses and we hauled him out onto shore.

  Well, it wasn't Jetboy, it was the one we got the make on as Edward “Smooth Eddy” Shiloh, a real small-time operator.

  And he was in bad shape, too. We got a wrench off the fire truck and popped his helmet, and he was purple as a turnip in there. It had taken him twenty-seven minutes to get to the ground. He'd passed out of course with not enough air up there, and he was so frostbit I heard they had to take off one of his feet and all but the thumb on the left hand.

  But he'd jumped out of the thing before it blew. We looked back up, hoping to see Jetboy's chute or something, but there wasn't one, just that misty big smudge up there, and all those planes zoomin' round.

  We took Shiloh to the hospital.

  That's my report.

  Statement of Edward “Smooth Eddy” Shiloh,

  Sept. 16, 1946 (excerpt).

  . . . all five shells into a couple of the gasbags. Then he crashed the plane right into us. The walls blew. Fred and Filmore were thrown out without their parachutes.

  When the pressure dropped, I felt like I couldn't move, the suit got so tight. I tried to get my parachute. I see that Dr. Tod has the fuse and is making it to the bomb thing.

  I felt the airplane fall off the side of the gondola. Next thing I know, Jetboy's standing right in front of the hole his plane made.

  I pull out my roscoe when I see he's packing heat. But he dropped his gat and he heads toward Tod.

  “Stop him, stop him!” Tod's yelling over the suit radio. I get one clean shot, but I miss, then he's on top of Tod and the bomb, and right then I decide my job's been over about five minutes and I'm not getting paid any overtime.

  So I head out, and all this gnashing and screaming's coming across the radio, and they're grappling around. Then Tod yells and pulls out his .45 and I swear he put four shots in Jetboy from closer than I am to you. Then they fall back together, and I jumped out the hole in the side.

  Only I was stupid, and I pulled my ripcord too soon, and my chute don't open right and got all twisted, and I started passing out. Just before I did, the whole thing blew up above me.

  Next thing I know, I wake up here, and I got one shoe too many, know what I mean? . . .

  . . . what did they say? Well, most of it was garbled. Let's see. Tod says “Stop him, stop him,” and I shot. Then I lammed for the hole. They were yelling. I could only hear Jetboy when their helmets slammed together, through Tod's suit radio. They must have crashed together a lot, 'cause I heard both of them breathing hard.

  Then Tod got to the gun and shot Jetboy four times and said “Die, Jetboy! Die!” and I jumped and they must have fought a second, and I heard Jetboy say:

  “I can't die yet. I haven't seen The Jolson Story.”

  It was eight years to the day after Thomas Wolfe died, but it was his kind of day. Across the whole of America and the northern hemisphere, it was one of those days when summer gives up its hold, when the weather comes from the poles and Canada again, rather than the Gulf and the Pacific.

  They eventually built a monument to Jetboy—“the kid that couldn't die yet.” A battle-scarred veteran of nineteen had stopped a madman from blowing up Manhattan. After calmer heads prevailed, they realized that.

  But it took a while to remember that. And to get around to going back to college, or buying that new refrigerator. It took a long time for anybody to remember what anything was like before September 15, 1946.

  When people in New York City looked up and saw Jetboy blowing up the attacking aircraft, they thought their troubles were over.

  They were as wrong as snakes on an eight-lane highway.

  —Daniel Deck

  GODOT IS MY CO-PILOT:

  A Life of Jetboy

  Lippincott, 1963

  From high up in the sky the fine mist began to curve downward.

  Part of it stretched itself out in the winds, as it went through the jet stream, toward the east.

  Beneath those currents, the mist re-formed and hung like verga, settling slowly to the city below, streamers forming and re-forming, breaking like scud near a storm.

  Wherever it came down, it made a sound like gentle autumn rain.

  THE SLEEPER

  by Roger Zelazny

  I. The Long Walk Home

  He was fourteen years old when sleep became his enemy, a dark and terrible thing he learned to fear as others feared death. It was not, however, a matter of neurosis in any of its more mysterious forms. A neurosis generally possesses irrational elements, while his fear proceeded from a specific cause and followed a course as logical as a geometrical theorem.

  Not that there was no irrationality in his life. Quite the contrary. But this was a result, not the cause, of his condition. At least, this is what he told himself later.

  Simply put, sleep was his bane, his nemesis. It was his hell on an installment plan.

  Croyd Crenson had completed eight grades of school and didn't make it through the ninth. This was not because of any fault of his own. While not at the top of his class he was not at the bottom either. He was an average kid of average build, freckly-faced, with blue eyes and straight brown hair. He had liked to play war games with his friends until the real war ended; then they played cops and robbers more and more often. When it was war he had waited—not too patiently—for his chance to be the ace fighter pilot, Jetboy; after the war, in cops and robbers, he was usually a robber.

  He'd started ninth grade, but like many others he never got through the first month: September 1946. . . .

  “What are you looking at?”

  He remembered Miss Marston's question but not her expression, because he didn't turn away from the spectacle. It was not uncommon for kids in his class to glance out the window with increasing frequency once three o'clock came within believable distance. It was u
ncommon for them not to turn away quickly, though, when addressed, feigning a final bout of attention while awaiting the dismissal bell.

  Instead, he had replied, “The blimps.”

  In that three other boys and two girls who also had a good line of sight were looking in the same direction, Miss Marston—her own curiosity aroused—crossed to the window. She halted there and stared.

  They were quite high—five or six of them, it seemed—tiny things at the end of an alleyway of cloud, moving as if linked together. And there was an airplane in the vicinity, making a rapid pass at them. Black-and-white memories of flashing newsreels, still fresh, came to mind. It actually looked as if the plane were attacking the silver minnows.

  Miss Marston watched for several moments, then turned away.

  “All right, class,” she began. “It's only—”

  Then the sirens sounded. Involuntarily, Miss Marston felt her shoulders rise and tighten.

  “Air raid!” called a girl named Charlotte in the first row.

  “Is not,” said Jimmy Walker, teeth braces flashing. “They don't have them anymore. The war's over.”

  “I know what they sound like,” Charlotte said. “Every time there was a blackout—”

  “But there's no more war,” Bobby Tremson stated.

  “That will be enough, class,” Miss Marston said. “Perhaps they're testing them.”

  But she looked back out the window and saw a small flash of fire in the sky before a reef of cloud blocked her view of the aerial conflict.

  “Stay in your seats,” she said then, as several students had risen and were moving toward the window. “I'm going to check in the office and see whether there's a drill that hadn't been announced. I'll be right back. You may talk if you do it quietly.”

  She departed, banging the door behind her. Croyd continued to stare at the cloud screen, waiting for it to part again.

  “It's Jetboy,” he said to Bobby Tremson, across the aisle.

  “Aw, c'mon,” Bobby said. “What would he be doing up there? The war's over.”

  “It's a jet plane. I've seen it in newsreels, and that's how it goes. And he's got the best one.”

  “You're just making that up,” Liza called from the rear of the room.

  Croyd shrugged.

  “There's somebody bad up there, and he's fighting them,” he said. “I saw the fire. There's shooting.”

  The sirens continued to wail. From the street outside came the sound of screeching brakes, followed by the brief hoot of an auto horn and the dull thud of collision.

  “Accident!” Bobby called, and everyone was getting up and moving to the window.

  Croyd rose then, not wanting his view blocked; and because he was near he found a good spot. He did not look at the accident, however, but continued to stare upward.

  “Caved in his trunk,” Joe Sarzanno said.

  “What?” a girl asked.

  Croyd heard the distant booming sounds now. The plane was no longer in sight.

  “What's the noise?” Bobby asked.

  “Antiaircraft fire,” Croyd said.

  “You're nuts!”

  “They're trying to shoot the things down, whatever they are.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Just like in the movies.”

  The clouds began to close again. But as they did, Croyd thought that he glimpsed the jet once more, sweeping in on a collision course with the blimps. His view was blocked then, before he could be sure.

  “Damn!” he said. “Get 'em, Jetboy!”

  Bobby laughed and Croyd shoved him, hard.

  “Hey! Watch who you're pushing!”

  Croyd turned toward him, but Bobby did not seem to want to pursue the matter. He was looking out of the window again, pointing.

  “Why are all those people running?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Is it the accident?”

  “Naw.”

  “Look! There's another!”

  A blue Studebaker had swung rapidly about the corner, swerved to miss the two stopped vehicles, and clipped an oncoming Ford. Both cars were turned at an angle. Other vehicles braked and halted to avoid colliding with them. Several horns began to sound. The muffled noises of antiaircraft fire continued within the wail of sirens. People were rushing along the streets now, not even pausing to regard the accidents.

  “Do you think the war started again?” Charlotte asked.

  “I don't know,” Leo said.

  The sound of a police siren was suddenly mixed with the other noises.

  “Jeez!” Bobby said. “Here comes another!”

  Before he finished speaking a Pontiac had run into the rear of one of the stopped vehicles. Three pairs of drivers confronted each other on foot; one couple angrily, the others simply talking and occasionally pointing upward. Shortly, they all departed and hurried off along the street.

  “This is no drill,” Joe said.

  “I know,” Croyd answered, staring at the area where a cloud had grown pink from the brightness it masked. “I think it's something real bad.”

  He moved back from the window.

  “I'm going home now,” he said.

  “You'll get in trouble,” Charlotte told him.

  He glanced at the clock.

  “I'll bet the bell rings before she gets back,” he answered. “If you don't go now I don't think they'll let you go with whatever that is going on—and I want to go home.”

  He turned away and crossed to the door.

  “I'm going, too,” Joe said.

  “You'll both get in trouble.”

  They passed along the hallway. As they neared the front door an adult voice, masculine, called out from up the hall, “You two! Come back here!”

  Croyd ran, shouldered open the big green door, and kept going. Joe was only a step behind him as he descended the steps. The street was full of stopped cars now, for as far as he could see in either direction. There were people on the tops of buildings and people at every window, most of them looking upward.

  He rushed to the sidewalk and turned right. His home was six blocks to the south, in an anomalous group of row houses in the eighties. Joe's route took him half that way, then off to the east.

  Before they reached the corner they were halted as a stream of people flowed from the side street to the right, cutting into their line of pedestrian traffic, some turning north and trying to push through, others heading south. The boys heard cursing and the sound of a fistfight from up ahead.

  Joe reached out and tugged at a man's sleeve. The man jerked his arm away, then looked down.

  “What's happening?” Joe shouted.

  “Some kind of bomb,” the man answered. “Jetboy tried to stop the guys who had it. I think they were all blown up. The thing might go off any minute. Maybe atomic.”

  “Where'd it fall?” Croyd yelled.

  The man gestured to the northwest.

  “That way.”

  Then the man was gone, having seen an opening and pushed his way through.

  “Croyd, we can get past on the street if we go over the hood of that car,” Joe said.

  Croyd nodded and followed the other boy across the still-warm hood of a gray Dodge. The driver swore at them, but his door was blocked by the press of bodies and the door on the passenger side could only open a few inches before hitting the fender of a taxi. They made their way around the cab and passed through the intersection at its middle, traversing two more cars on the way.

  Pedestrian traffic eased near to the center of the next block, and it looked as if there was a large open area ahead. They sprinted toward it, then halted abruptly.

  A man lay upon the pavement. He was having convulsions. His head and hands had swollen enormously, and they were dark red, almost purple in color. Just as they caught sight of him, blood began to rush from his nose and mouth; it trickled from his ears, it oozed from his eyes and about his fingernails.

  “Holy Mary!” Joe said, crossing himself as he drew back. “What's he got?”
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  “I don't know,” Croyd answered. “Let's not get too close. Let's go over some more cars.”

  It took them ten minutes to reach the next corner. Somewhere along the way they noticed that the guns had been silent for a long time, though the air-raid sirens, police sirens, and auto horns maintained a steady din.

  “I smell smoke,” Croyd said.

  “Me, too. If something's burning no fire truck's going to get to it.”

  “Whole damn town could burn down.”

  “Maybe it's not all like this.”

  “Bet it is.”

  They pushed ahead, were caught in a press of bodies and swept about the corner.

  “We're not going this way!” Croyd yelled.

  But it did not matter, as the mass of people about them was halted seconds later.

  “Think we can crawl through to the street and go over cars again?” Joe asked.

  “Might as well try.”

  They made it. Only this time, as they worked their way back toward the corner it was slower, as others were taking the same route. Croyd saw a reptilian face through a windshield then, and scaly hands clutching at a steering wheel that had been torn loose from its column as the driver slowly slumped to the side. Looking away, he saw a rising tower of smoke from beyond buildings to the northeast.

  When they reached the corner there was no place to descend. People stood packed and swaying. There were occasional screams. He wanted to cry, but he knew it would do no good. He clenched his teeth and shuddered.

  “What're we going to do?” he called to Joe.

  “If we're stuck here overnight we can bust the window on an empty car and sleep in it, I guess.”

  “I want to go home!”

  “Me, too. Let's try and keep going as far as we can.”

  They inched their way down the street for the better part of an hour, but only made another block. Drivers howled and pounded on windows as they climbed over the roofs of their cars. Other cars were empty. A few others contained things they did not like to look at. Sidewalk traffic looked dangerous now. It was fast and loud, with brief fights, numerous screams, and a number of fallen bodies which had been pushed into doorways or off the curb into the street. There had been a few seconds' hesitation and silence when the sirens had stopped. Then came the sound of someone speaking over a bullhorn. But it was too far away. The words were not distinguishable, except for “bridges.” The panic resumed.