He laid a hand over Tom’s. “My dearest friends. What an adventure we have had.”
“Yeah, life is, like, pretty neat, man.”
“Why didn’t you kill him?” Tom asked.
Tach shifted, and stared up into Tom’s brown eyes. “Because I would like to believe in the possibility of redemption.”
Tom’s grip tightened. “Believe it.”
With a Little Help from His Friends
by Victor Milán
CONTROVERSIAL SCIENTIST BRUTALLY SLAIN IN LAB, the headline read.
“You should see what it says in the Daily News,” she said.
“Young lady,” Dr. Tachyon said, shoving the sheaf of New York Timeses away with fastidious fingertips and settling back perilously far in his swivel chair, “a policeman I am not. A doctor I am.”
She frowned at him across the meticulous rectangle of his desk, cleared her throat, a small, fussy sound. “You have a reputation as father and protector to Jokertown. If you don’t act, an innocent joker is going to go down for murder.”
It was his turn to frown. He ticked the high heel of one boot against the desk’s metal lip. “Have you evidence? If so, the unfortunate fellow’s legal counsel is the man to take it to.”
“No. Nothing.”
He plucked a yellow daffodil from a vase at his elbow, twirled its bell before his nose. “I wonder. You are perceptive enough to play on my sense of guilt, surely.”
She smiled back, made a deprecating hand-wave, forest-animal quick and almost furtive, but slightly stiff. It was coming to him, irrelevantly, how acculturated he had become to this heavy world; his first reaction had been that she was scarcely this side of painfully thin, and only now did he appreciate how closely she approached the elfin pallid Takisian ideal of beauty. An albino almost, skin pale as paper, white-blond hair, eyes barely blue. To his eyes she was drably dressed, a peach-colored skirt suit, cut severely, worn over a white blouse, a chain at her neck, as pale and fine as one of her hairs.
“It’s my job, Doctor, as you’re well aware. My paper expects me to know what goes on in Jokertown.” Sara Morgenstern had been the Washington Post’s expert on ace affairs since her coverage of the Jokertown riots ten years ago had gleaned her a nomination for the Pulitzer prize.
He made no response. She dropped her eyes. “Doughboy wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t kill anyone. He’s gentle. He’s retarded, you see.”
“I know that.”
“He lives with a joker they call the Shiner, down on Eldridge. Shiner looks after him.”
“An innocent.”
“Like a child. Oh, he was arrested in ’76 for attacking a policeman. But that was … different. He—it was in the air.” She seemed to want to say more, but her voice snagged.
“Indeed it was.” He cocked his head. “You seem unusually involved.”
“I can’t stand to see Doughboy get hurt. He’s bewildered, afraid. I just can’t keep my journalist’s objectivity.”
“And the police? Why not go to them?”
“They have a suspect.”
“But your paper? Surely the Post is not without influence.”
She shook back icefall hair. “Oh, I can write a scathing exposé, Doctor. Perhaps the New York papers will pick it up. Maybe even Sixty Minutes. Maybe—oh, in a year or two—there’ll be a public outcry, maybe justice will be done. In the meantime he’s in the Tombs, Doctor. A child, lonely and afraid. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be unjustly accused, to have your freedom wrongfully taken away?”
“Yes. I do.”
She bit her lip. “I forgot. I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing.”
Tach leaned forward. “I’m a busy man, dear lady. I have a clinic to run. I keep trying to convince the authorities that the Swarm Mother won’t necessarily go away simply because we defeated her first incursion, but instead may be preparing a new and even deadlier attack.” He sighed. “Well. I suppose I must look into this.”
“You’ll help?”
“I will.”
“Thank God.”
He stood up and came around to stand by her. She tipped her head back, lips curiously slack, and he had the sense that she was trying to be alluring without quite knowing how to go about it.
What is this? he wondered. He was not normally one to pass up an invitation from so attractive a woman, but there was something hidden here, and the old Takisian blood-feud instincts made him sheer away. Not that he sensed a threat; just a mystery, and that in itself was threatening to one of his caste.
On a whim, half irritated that she was making an offer and making it impossible to accept, he reached out and snagged the chain at her throat. A plain silver locket emerged, engraved with the initials A.W. in copperplate. She reached for it quickly, but cat-nimble he flipped it open.
A picture of a girl, a child, no more than thirteen. Her hair was yellow, the features fuller, the grin haughtier, but she bore an unmistakable resemblance to Sara Morgenstern. “Your daughter?”
“My—my sister.”
“‘A.W.’?”
“Morgenstern was my married name, Doctor. I kept it after my divorce.” She half-turned away, knees pressed together, shoulders hunched. “Andrea was her name. Andrea Whitman.”
“Was?”
“She died.” She stood up rapidly.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Uncle Tachy! Uncle Tachy!” A blond projectile hit him in the shin and wrapped about him like seaweed as he stepped up to the door of the Cosmic Pumpkin (“Food for Body, Mind, & Spirit”) Head Shop and Delicatessen on Fitz-James O’Brien Street, near the border of Jokertown and the Village. Laughing, he bent down, scooped the little girl up and hugged her.
“What did you bring me, Uncle Tachy?”
He rooted in a pocket of his coat, produced a caramel cube. “Don’t tell your father I gave you this.” Wide-eyed solemn, she shook her head.
He carried her into amiable clutter. Inside he was clenched. Hard to believe this beautiful child of nine was mentally retarded, like Doughboy, permanently consigned to four.
Doughboy had been easier, somehow. He was immense, over two meters tall, an almost-spherical mass of white flesh, hairless, faintly bluish, face bloated almost to featurelessness, raisin eyes staring out from fat and tears. He was in his late twenties. He could not remember ever being called by anything other than a cruel nickname from a bakery’s registered trademark. He was frightened. He missed Mr. Shiner and Mr. Benson the newsdealer who lived below them, he wanted the Go-Bot Shiner had bought him shortly before the men came and took him away. He wanted to go home, to get away from strange harsh men who poked him with their fingers and called him mocking names. He was pathetically grateful to Tachyon for coming to see him; when Tach took leave, in the bile-green visitation room in the Tombs, he clung to his hand and wept.
Tach wept too, but afterward, when Doughboy couldn’t see.
But Doughboy was obviously a joker, victim of the wild card virus Tach’s own clan had brought this world. Sprout Meadows was physically a perfect child, exquisite even by the exacting standards of the lord-lines of Ilkazam or Alaa or Kalimantari, sweeter-tempered than any daughter of Takis. Yet she was no less deformed than Doughboy, no less a monster by the standards of Tach’s homeworld—and like him would have been instantly destroyed.
He looked around. A couple of secretaries nibbled late lunch by the front window, under the weathered aegis of a cigar-store Indian. “Where’s your daddy?”
Her mouth carameled shut, she nodded her head left toward the head shop.
“What are you staring at, buster?” a voice demanded.
He blinked, focused belatedly on a sturdy young woman in a soiled gray CUNY sweatshirt standing behind the glass deli display. “I beg your pardon?”
“Listen, you male chauvinist asshole, I know about you. Just watch yourself.”
Belatedly Tach recalled Mark Meadows’s interchangeable pair
of clerks. “Ah—Brenda, is it?” A pugnacious nod. “Very well, Brenda, let me assure you I had no intention of staring at you.”
“Oh, I get it. I’m not a debutante type like Peregrine, not your kind at all. I’m one of those women men like you don’t see.” She ran a hand through a stiff brush of hair, reddish with tea-colored roots, sniffed.
“Doc!” A familiar stork figure stood bent over in the doorway to the head shop.
“Mark, I am so glad to see you,” Tachyon said with feeling. He kissed Sprout on the forehead, ruffled her pigtailed hair, set her on the murky linoleum. “Run and play, dearest child. I would speak with your father.”
She scooted off. “Have you a moment, Mark?”
“Oh, sure, man. Always, for you.”
A pair of kids with leather overcoats and dandelion-climax hair lurked among the paraphernalia and vintage posters on the other side, but Mark was not the suspicious type. He nodded Tach toward a table by the far wall, collected a teapot and a couple of mugs, and followed, loose-limbed, bobbing his head slightly as he walked. He had on an ancient pink Brooks Brothers shirt, a fringed leather vest, a pair of vast elephant bells faded almost to the hue of the white firework bursts tie-dyed into them. Shoulder-length blond hair was crimped at his temples by a braided thong. Had Tachyon not seen him in the full splendor of his secret identity, he’d have thought the man had no sense of dress at all.
“So what can I do for you, man?” Mark asked, beaming happily through the glass planchets of his wire-rims.
Tach set elbows on the tablecloth—also tie-dyed—pursed his lips as Mark poured. “A joker named Doughboy has been arrested for murder. A young woman reporter has come to me maintaining that he’s innocent.”
He drew breath. “I myself believe it too. He is a very gentle individual, for all that he is huge and hideous and possesses metahuman strength. He is … retarded.”
He waited a moment, heart hanging in his throat, but what Mark said was, “So it’s a rip-off, man. Why do the pigs say he did it?” The epithet was spoken without rancor.
“The murdered man is a Dr. Warner Fred Warren, a popular astronomy—to use the term loosely—writer in the tabloids. To give you some idea, he wrote an article last year entitled, ‘Did Comet Kohoutek Bring AIDS?’”
Mark grimaced. He was not your standard hippie, disdaining/distrusting all science. Then again, he was a latecomer to the faith, who had gotten into Flower Power at a time when everyone else in the Bay Area was getting heavily into Stalin.
“Dr. Warren’s latest prognostication is that an asteroid is about to strike the Earth and end all life, or at least civilization as you know it. It did create quite a bit of controversy; amazing what attention you Earthers lavish on such folly. The police theorize that Doughboy heard his friends talking about it, became frightened, and one night last week went into the doctor’s lab and beat him to death.”
Mark whistled softly. “Any evidence?”
“Three witnesses.” Tach paused. “One of them positively identifies Doughboy as the man he saw leaving Warren’s apartment building the night of the crime.”
Mark waved a hand. “No problem. We’ll get him free, man.”
Tachyon opened his mouth, shut it. Finally he said, “We need to see what other information they have amassed in the case. The police are not proving cooperative. They tell me to mind my own business, almost!”
Mark’s blue eyes drifted off Tach’s sightline. Tach sipped his tea. It was stringent and crisp, some kind of mint. “I know how you can take care of that. Does Doughboy, like, have an attorney?”
“Legal Aid.”
“Why don’t you get in touch with him, offer to act as unpaid medical expert.”
“Splendid.” He looked quizzically at his friend, head tipped like a curious bird. “How do you know to do that?”
“I don’t know, man. It just came to me. So, like, where do I come in?”
Tach studied the tabletop. In the background forks clove tofu and thunked against earthenware cushioned by soggy romaine lettuce. It had been as much for the tonic effect Mark had on his spirits that he’d come here from the Tombs. But still …
He was out of his depth; he was, as he’d assured Sara, no detective. Now, Mark Meadows, the Last Hippie, didn’t on the surface appear a much more promising candidate for sleuth, but he happened also to be Marcus Aurelius Meadows, PhD, the most brilliant biochemist alive. Before dropping out he’d been responsible for a number of breakthroughs, laid the groundwork for many more. He was trained to observe and trained to think. He was a genius.
Also, Tach liked the cut of his coat, which in itself was about enough for a Takisian.
“You’ve already helped me, Mark. This is your world after all. You understand its ways better than I.” Though I’ve been on it longer, he realized. “And there are your friends. You do have, ah, others than the two we met on my cousin’s ship?”
Mark nodded. “Three others, so far.”
“Good. I hope these prove more tractable than the others.” He hoped one or the other of the Captain’s alter egos would have skills that might fall handy; fortunately he could imagine no purpose the surly were-porpoise Aquarius might serve, but the vainglorious coward Cosmic Traveler was another matter. And even to save poor Doughboy from death in life, he wasn’t ready to endure the Traveler again so soon.
He scraped his chair back and rose. “Let us go play detective together, you and I.”
The kid had cammie pants and a Rambo rag, standing there on the corner of Hester and the Bowery trying to hold down magazine pages against the wind’s tugging. Tach glanced over his shoulder. The article was slugged, “Dr. Death: Self-made Cyborg Soldier of Fortune Battles Commies in Salvo.”
The kid looked up as the two men took their places beside him at the newsstand, truculence tightening lean Puerto Rican features. His expression flowed like wax into awe.
He was looking at the center button of a yellow paisley vest. Out over his forehead an immense green bow tie with yellow polka dots blossomed from a pink shirt collar. To either side hung a purple tailcoat. A purple stovepipe hat, its green band embossed in gold peace signs, threatened the watered-milk overcast.
Yellow-gloved fingers flashed a V. “Peace,” said the beaky norteamericano face hovering up there amid all that color.
The kid tossed the magazine at the proprietor and fled.
Captain Trips stood blinking after him, wounded. “What’d I say, man?”
“Never mind,” chortled the being behind the counter. “He wouldn’t have bought it anyway. What can I do you for, Doctor? And your colorful friend here?”
“Mm,” said Mark, sniffing, nostrils wide, “fresh popcorn.”
“That’s me,” Jube said. “That’s how I smell.” Tachyon winced.
“Far out!”
For a moment glass-bead eyes stared, blue-black skin rumpled up Jubal’s forehead: orogenic surprise. Then he laughed.
“I get it! You’re a hippie.”
The Cap’n beamed. “That’s right, man.”
Blubber shook. “Goo-goo-goo-Jube,” he bellowed. “I am the Walrus. Pleased to meetcha.”
He did look like a walrus, five foot nothing, hanging fat, a big smooth skull with random hair-tufts sticking out from it here and there like rusty shaving brushes, flowing into the collar of his green and black and yellow Hawaiian shirt without the intervention of a neck. He had little white tusks stuck at either end of his grin. He pushed out a Warner Brothers cartoon hand, three fingers and a thumb, which the Captain eagerly shook.
“This is Captain Trips. An ace, a new associate of mine. Captain, meet Jubal Benson. Jube, we need from you some information.”
“Shoot.” He made a pistol gesture with his right hand, rolled his eyes at Trips.
“What do you know about the joker called Doughboy?”
Jube scowled tectonically. “That’s a bum rap. Boy wouldn’t hurt a fly. He even lives in the same rooming house I do. See him most every da
y—used to, before this came down.”
“He didn’t, like, hear people talking about an asteroid crashing into the Earth and get real worked up about it, did he?” Trips asked. A vagrant piece of newsprint had washed up against the backs of his calves on a wind that hadn’t yet realized it was spring. He ignored it and the chill alike.
“If he’d heard anything like that, he’d hide under his cot and you’d never get him out till you convinced him it was a joke. Is that what they’re claiming?”
Trips nodded.
“The one to talk to is Shiner. He rents the place, feeds Doughboy, and lets him stay there. He’s got a shoeshine stand up Bowery almost to Delancey, up where Jokertown’s more touristy.”
“Would he be there now?” Tach asked.
Jube consulted a Mickey Mouse watch whose band all but vanished into his rubbery wrist. “Lunch hour’s over, which means he’s prob’ly knocking off himself to eat lunch right now. He should be home. Apartment Six.”
Tachyon thanked him. Solemn, Trips tipped his hat. They started off.
“Doc.”
“Yes, Jubal.”
“Better get this cleared up quick. Things could get very heavy around here this summer if Doughboy gets a railroad job. They say Gimli’s back on the streets.”
An eyebrow rose. “Tom Miller? But I thought he was in Russia.”
The Walrus laid a finger along his broad flat nose. “That’s what I mean, Doc. That’s what I mean.”
“I found him, oh, fifteen, sixteen year ago it was.” The man called Shiner sat on his cot in the single room of the apartment on Eldridge Street, rocking to and fro with his hands clasped between skinny knees. “Back in 1970. Wintertime it was. He was sitting there next to a dumpster in a alley behind this mask shop, bawling his eyes out. Mama just took him there and left him.”
“That’s terrible, man,” said Trips. He and Tach were standing on the meticulously swept hardwood floor of the apartment. Shiner’s cot and a big mattress with stained ticking were the only furniture.
“Oh, I guess maybe I can understand. He was eleven or twelve, already twice as big as me, stronger’n most men. Must have been powerful hard to take care of.”